Cubed Issue #12, Christmas Special | Page 20

18

FOOTBALL MANAGER 2017

Developer : Sports Interactive Price : £ 35 Platform : PC , Mac , Linux Release date : 4 November , 2016

Unlike fantasy or action-oriented games , the majority of the target audience and consumers have actual , at least partial , experience of what the whole genre purports to offer . And nowhere is this more apparent than the evergreen Football Manager franchise .

Grand Theft Auto-type joyriding and mass murder tends not to form too many gamers ’ pre-gameplay experience ; but an intimate knowledge and experience of the foundation

of FM17 is what players bring to the table . Or at least they think they do . Living out the childhood fantasy of turning your experience of playing and watching football into controlling it is precisely the USP of these franchises . And don ’ t they half know it .

Yet , in this year ’ s edition , released suitably in time for Christmas and branded for the next calendar year – this has led to an all too easy complacency and fiddling .

No amount of free Brexit-piggybacking publicity can hide the fact that the developers and publishers know they have a large enough captive audience no matter what they do , so why take any risk of upsetting the apple cart ? This leads to yearly editions

conservatively building on relatively minor changes from the year before , with all concerned laughing to the bank . Solid enough franchises are updated and churned out – but at what cost ?

Smoothly updated and with the reliably slick controls , Football Manager 2017 was no different from all of its predecessors in that regard . But as a relatively loyal purchaser , it left me feeling rather cold .

With gamers demanding absolute perfection as they shell out £ 35 to live their dreams via a PC , minor details are all too easy to pick up as missing from the wider picture . Why are the football stadiums not right ? Why are there no fans attending ? With the

developers ’ multi-million pound budgets for these games , the little details really shouldn ’ t be too hard to get right .

And as many users and reviewers have pointed out , the total somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts .

The gold dust , and unidentifiable magic that left users quite literally hooked and playing for hours after midnight – has somehow diluted over the years .

By providing users with almost too much control , this has become a manual for tiny details rather than a grander project or something you could really identify with . When we all look back years from now – will this be identified as the franchise that hooked an entire generation , or furthered the love affair

? Hardly . This is just a rather limp post-natal family holiday to Cornwall . Nice enough for what it is , but is only papering over longerterm staleness , and to no immediate end .

I shall be persevering for now , but out of a sense of obligation rather than raw delight . With slick gameplay and a deliverable concept – this should have been a home run . But as yet , it ’ s certainly struggling to get to third base .