Football Manager 2012 allows you to take control of any club in over 50 nations across the world, including all of the biggest leagues across Europe. You're in the hot-seat, which means you decide who plays and who sits on the bench, you're in total control of tactics, team-talks, substitutions and pitch-side instructions as you follow the match live with the acclaimed 3D match engine allowing YOU to make the difference!
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The one that got me addicted to FM
The GCSE years
Basically, FM-12 is the same old immersive, addictive simulation game that you've been playing for years. Only, it's got a few new tweaks and the match engine has been refined a bit.
The new contracts system lets you lock certain aspects you think are non-negotiable. For example, locking the weekly wages of a player may result in his agent asking for exorbitant appearance bonus. It's a mildly interesting feature, but it helps keep your budget under control. That being said, there's still naught you can do about negotiating contracts with your staff.
Tone has been added to player interaction. It makes a minor difference and you'll have to play around with tone to figure out which tone your team best reacts to. The game never fully explains and I think it's all a matter of trial and error more than anything else to get the tone right. Player interactions could help improve your relationship with your players and result in you being in their favoured personnel list.
Staff interactions, however, are rudimentary. There's nothing you can do to improve your relationship with your staff, and this is quite annoying. Similarly, there's very little you can do to prevent other teams from poaching your best coaches except perhaps try to offer them a new contract and hope they stay. However, training players for preferred moves now happens through coach interactions, and it helps because the player cannot refuse to learn a new move.
CORE GAMEPLAY -- Remains the same, pretty much. You can now ask your team to familiarise itself with up to 3 tactics, which probably helps for home/away/difficult games. You set your tactics and play, and if you've got good players playing in the right positions and with the right tactics, you'll probably do well. That being said, the game's biggest problem, right from the beginning of the series to now, is that it's a game based on probability. Except possibly for some bugs or glitches, if you've won too many games on the trot, you will probably lose the next one. It happens. Sometimes, it just feels contrived. And though it may count as cheating, when you quit the game before restarting it and play through the match again with completely different tactics, you will still end up seeing the same result most of the times. It just gives you a feeling that it's all been scripted on the whole, and all you're doing is filling in the details.
SUMMARY -- All in all, FM-12 remains a good football manager simulation, probably the best there is. If you've been playing FM all along, there's no reason to stop now. And let's face it, if you've been a fan of the FM series, you're not going to stop playing. Just go along for the ride. It's a fun one.
The new contracts system lets you lock certain aspects you think are non-negotiable. For example, locking the weekly wages of a player may result in his agent asking for exorbitant appearance bonus. It's a mildly interesting feature, but it helps keep your budget under control. That being said, there's still naught you can do about negotiating contracts with your staff.
Tone has been added to player interaction. It makes a minor difference and you'll have to play around with tone to figure out which tone your team best reacts to. The game never fully explains and I think it's all a matter of trial and error more than anything else to get the tone right. Player interactions could help improve your relationship with your players and result in you being in their favoured personnel list.
Staff interactions, however, are rudimentary. There's nothing you can do to improve your relationship with your staff, and this is quite annoying. Similarly, there's very little you can do to prevent other teams from poaching your best coaches except perhaps try to offer them a new contract and hope they stay. However, training players for preferred moves now happens through coach interactions, and it helps because the player cannot refuse to learn a new move.
CORE GAMEPLAY -- Remains the same, pretty much. You can now ask your team to familiarise itself with up to 3 tactics, which probably helps for home/away/difficult games. You set your tactics and play, and if you've got good players playing in the right positions and with the right tactics, you'll probably do well. That being said, the game's biggest problem, right from the beginning of the series to now, is that it's a game based on probability. Except possibly for some bugs or glitches, if you've won too many games on the trot, you will probably lose the next one. It happens. Sometimes, it just feels contrived. And though it may count as cheating, when you quit the game before restarting it and play through the match again with completely different tactics, you will still end up seeing the same result most of the times. It just gives you a feeling that it's all been scripted on the whole, and all you're doing is filling in the details.
SUMMARY -- All in all, FM-12 remains a good football manager simulation, probably the best there is. If you've been playing FM all along, there's no reason to stop now. And let's face it, if you've been a fan of the FM series, you're not going to stop playing. Just go along for the ride. It's a fun one.
This game is the reason I created a Steam account and became my first ever Steam game. I loved the CM games in the early 2000s and while the FM games in general provided a lot of improvements over older titles, my overall level of enjoyment versus previous CM titles was not reached.
best game ever. period
"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live" - Albus Dumbledore
I got into FM on the 2005 edition and spent an inordinate amount of time on it over the next several years, likely as a form of escapism given that my football team IRL spent most of the noughties being wildly inconsistent and the early 2010s being consistently shite. Since it's difficult to review every iteration of a game that is released every year to mostly incremental evolutions, I'll keep my review to the 2012 edition which is one of the last that I played, and probably the one I played the most.
The game is unbelievably addictive. It sucked me straight in and didn't let me go for years, and it's very easy to see the appeal. It's a great football simulator with lots of detail, and really makes you feel like you are viewing an alternate timeline's football results. I lost count of the number of different save games I had in different leagues, and this game remains responsible for the one and only triple-all-nighter I've pulled in my life. I still remember my greatest triumphs (matching my rival's 10-game winning streak to close their season with a 10-game streak of my own to win the title by one point) and greatest failures (getting promoted to a higher division but setting the record for lowest points tally and getting the entire unhappy squad gutted by rivals at bargain prices) as if they actually happened.
The ongoing problem I had with the series was that the tactical and training mechanics were extremely opaque, and the games did a pretty bad job at teaching the player how to play it. With other games, if I die I generally know what I did wrong and what I can do next time, but it's very difficult to know in a game like this if my failures were due to my errors or due to randomness. (The fact that I can lose a match 5-1 and then load the save and win it 7-0 with the exact same tactical setup proves this.) Of course, football simulators have to include this type of opacity and randomness to reflect the vagaries of the sport in real life. But there has to be a balance between some random variance, and leaving the player feeling lost and helpless and unable to influence the game in a meaningful and deliberate way, and on reflection I don't think the series toed that line particularly well. I put up with it at the expense of experiencing a wider variety of games because... I was unhappy with the state of footy in real life I guess.
I have no idea how to rate this, but a 3/5 probably sums up my feelings. It's probably the series I spent the most time playing, yet looking back it's probably also one of the few I regret spending that much time on.
I got into FM on the 2005 edition and spent an inordinate amount of time on it over the next several years, likely as a form of escapism given that my football team IRL spent most of the noughties being wildly inconsistent and the early 2010s being consistently shite. Since it's difficult to review every iteration of a game that is released every year to mostly incremental evolutions, I'll keep my review to the 2012 edition which is one of the last that I played, and probably the one I played the most.
The game is unbelievably addictive. It sucked me straight in and didn't let me go for years, and it's very easy to see the appeal. It's a great football simulator with lots of detail, and really makes you feel like you are viewing an alternate timeline's football results. I lost count of the number of different save games I had in different leagues, and this game remains responsible for the one and only triple-all-nighter I've pulled in my life. I still remember my greatest triumphs (matching my rival's 10-game winning streak to close their season with a 10-game streak of my own to win the title by one point) and greatest failures (getting promoted to a higher division but setting the record for lowest points tally and getting the entire unhappy squad gutted by rivals at bargain prices) as if they actually happened.
The ongoing problem I had with the series was that the tactical and training mechanics were extremely opaque, and the games did a pretty bad job at teaching the player how to play it. With other games, if I die I generally know what I did wrong and what I can do next time, but it's very difficult to know in a game like this if my failures were due to my errors or due to randomness. (The fact that I can lose a match 5-1 and then load the save and win it 7-0 with the exact same tactical setup proves this.) Of course, football simulators have to include this type of opacity and randomness to reflect the vagaries of the sport in real life. But there has to be a balance between some random variance, and leaving the player feeling lost and helpless and unable to influence the game in a meaningful and deliberate way, and on reflection I don't think the series toed that line particularly well. I put up with it at the expense of experiencing a wider variety of games because... I was unhappy with the state of footy in real life I guess.
I have no idea how to rate this, but a 3/5 probably sums up my feelings. It's probably the series I spent the most time playing, yet looking back it's probably also one of the few I regret spending that much time on.