"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.