Football Manager 2016 Review (PC)

I have played about ten full Football Manager 2016 seasons so far in the Premier League, and none of them has managed to feature the spectacular collapse that real world Chelsea are suffering after having an impressive season last year.

It's also rare to see Leicester delivering the kind of solid matches and constant scoring record that's defining their current campaign, and there are plenty of other small real-world occurrences that the title fails to capture.

The game can deliver plenty of spectacular matches and surprising results, and the core engine has been updated in some significant ways, but there's no way for a simulation to take into account all the little details and events that drive the evolution of modern football.

Football Manager 2016 offers, at first sight, only a slight evolution when compared to the previous installment in the Sports Interactive created sports series, but there are solid additions that give gamers more data and more options to live out their fantasy football life.

Story

Football Manager 2016 has the same core framework, allowing players to choose from a wide number of real world teams from actual leagues and then try to lead them to impressive victories or towards shameful defeats.

The narrative element of the Sports Interactive experience is more important than ever, with the studio offering players a wide range of tools designed to simulate interactions with players, club leadership, and the press.

Talking to people as the manager of a football club can take up a lot of time, but the system fails to deliver a full-fledged set of consequences and gameplay dynamics.

I like the press conferences and the player talks and promises that pepper a season in the regular Football Manager 2016 career mode, but they should have a bigger impact on the coach character I have created and on his future.

Football Manager 2016 goal action

As it stands now, the game asks players to care about conversations, which can become repetitive in the long run, but the narrative they can create fails to have the depth that many were expecting when the feature was first introduced a few years ago.

For those who want a more stripped down version of the mechanics, which focuses on tactics and eliminates plenty of the bloat that some long-term fans disapprove of, the Classic mode has been renamed Touch and allows all those interested to play through a season in a few hours.

Sports Interactive is also introducing a new Create a Club mode, giving gamers more control as they bring to life an entirely new team and then try to lead it towards greatness.

Gameplay

Football Manager 2016 is the first title in the long-running series that understands the tension that coaches are under to deliver constant high-quality performances while also innovating to improve the performance of their teams.

Gamers have a wide range of choices linked to their clubs, able to handle everything from tactics and training to transfer policy and the way youngsters develop, and each section of the title has seen boosts towards realism.

Football Manager 2016 keeps up with the most recent trends of real-world football, and the engine is powerful enough to support a variety of play styles, including oddities like no forward teams and any other innovations players can think of.

But the biggest change Sports Interactive makes is linked to how the Artificial Intelligence plays the game and how it creates a challenge for the player-controlled club.

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In previous installments, once a gamer hits a winning setup, he could safely use it for almost every match, only switching it when he brought in a new player or when he had to deal with a particularly capable opponent.

In Football Manager 2016, every new match requires careful planning and tactical tweaks, and the AI adapts as seasons progress and forces gamers to find the weakness of every new opponent and design ways to exploit it.

Sports Interactive wants gamers to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of a club to create winning strategies and the new partnership with Prozone, a real world analytics outfit, is a crucial new feature.

Gamers can see a lot of data about the matches, presented in easy-to-use form, and they need to use it to improve their tactical choices.

The video game also delivers a more realistic take on transfers, especially for the big clubs that can spend a lot of money, the database has been improved to take into account the performance of players over the past 12 months and realism has also been added to scouting and contract negotiations.

I tend to play Liverpool in Football Manager, and for my first few campaigns in this year's installment, I was frustrated, even if I appreciated the challenge offered by AI teams and the increased realism level.

I only managed to find success when I spent the entire pre-season period actively watching how my players reacted to each of my tactical choices, watching heat maps and the way changes were created, gaining a deeper understanding of my team and the instructions that work for it.

I created a first team and a set of tactics that gave me a ten-match undefeated, and I was already dreaming of winning the Premier League when other managers understood my choices and shifted their setups to counter me, leading to a drop that saw me reach the 10th position in December.

“Football Manager 2016 does not feature a lot of entirely new mechanics, but it manages to integrate existing ones to make the gameplay more exciting and more unpredictable than ever before.”

One element of the game that Sports Interactive has been talking a lot about before release is the new manager avatar, but this is one of the most useless elements to have been added to the series in a long time and has no positive impact on the experience.

Graphics and audio

Football Manager 2016 is not the kind of video game that will succeed or fail because of its visual quality, but the title does introduce some improvements when it comes to the 3D engine that's used to simulate the various matches.

Teams at EA Sports and Konami working on FIFA and PES should not feel threatened by it, but there are upgrades when it comes to both the looks and the movement of the players, who feel less like automatons and more like football professionals.

I personally still like to experience matches in the top down 2D view and allow my imagination to create the action, but for those who want to see an actual pitch action delivered by 22 simulations of real world persons, the option is better than ever.

Football Manager 2016 player profiles

Football Manager 2016 introduces a range of changes to the interface that drives the experience, none of them revolutionary but all of them designed to make it easier for players to get information and then use it to improve their team's performance.

The collaboration with Prozone means that there's more information about matches than ever before, and Sports Interactive has managed to create a system that makes it easy to spend a lot of time simply evaluating performance and thinking about potential tweaks.

Multiplayer

Football Manager 2016 tends to be a long-term solitary experience for me, but plenty of gamers want to engage with friends to raise the stakes for their careers and to have something to say about the water cooler.

It's very easy to set up a league with multiple managers, although everyone should be aware of the time commitment involved, and for this installment Sports Interactive is also offering a new Fantasy Draft experience.

Inspired, at least in part, by the success of Ultimate Team in FIFA, the mode offers gamers a budget cap and a randomized selection of players to build their dream team before taking them to a mini-league that will determine who made the best choices.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion