Championship Manager 2010 - Hands On Preview

Following a year's sabbatical for Beautiful Game Studios' Championship Manager series in 2008/09, this year's iteration is now in pole position for the imminently approaching football season. Sports Interactive announced an October 30th release for Football Manager 2010 earlier this week, which gives Champ Man a sizeable head start on the competition with its now entrenched September 11th launch. However, while it may have the head start, the key question is whether or not it has the legs to stride past FM 2010 as the season unfolds.

One thing's clear from the outset with Champ Man 2010: Beautiful Game Studios has been working hard over the last two years to bring the series forward in leaps and bounds, which is the sort of innovation that Champ Man has sorely lacked over the past five years. It's now brimming with new features that Eidos can proudly market in the customary back-of-the-box manner, including an all-new 3D match engine, global scouting networks, a set-piece editor, and alike. However, these improvements alone are only half the challenge.

In The Dug-Out

The last time we came face-to-face with Champ Man, it fell down on the basics such as a 3D match engine that accounted for way too many goals from set-pieces and buggy data for a club's transfer budget. It's these sorts of slip-ups that ruin a gamer's immersion in a football management game, which is why we were a little dubious to be prompted by the following messages when starting a new game of CM10: firstly, we were a little miffed by a transfer budget of £43 million for Liverpool, which is certainly on the high side of estimates for the club's financial status following the signing of Glen Johnson earlier in this year (perhaps BGS knows something everyone else doesn't).

The second head scratcher was the board's expectations for the upcoming season. It seems they wanted Liverpool to achieve a "comfortable mid-table position", which is a result so bad that it would probably cause every scouse on Merseyside to riot in a way that would make a plague of locusts seem mild. From here on out though, CM10's depth of research was hard to falter. For example, Inter will part with Zlatan Ibrahimovic for around about the £40 million mark (BGS hasn't updated for his move to Barcelona yet), although the headband wearing Swede then demands £230,000 in weekly wages and a signing on fee the size of a developing country's GDP, which sounds about right to us.

Likewise, Bayern Munich will eventually agree to let you discuss terms with Franck Ribery for just over £35 million which, again, sound likes an accurate price. Complimenting this sturdy looking transfer market is a news feed tab (aptly titled, 'The Back Page') that's easy to trawl and has mocked-up articles branded by the UK's foremost tabloid papers and footie mags. The feed is then presented in a way that appears more like you're cruising the net rather than playing a management game, which is another welcome touch. The interface has improved all around in this latest version actually, not only with headlining additions such as the global scouting network, but in the smaller additions throughout training and in the match engine as well.

Team talks deliver the sort of depth that the genre has been yearning for, with a wider range of actions and specific addresses to not only individual players and the team as a whole, but for the defensive, midfield, and attacking units specifically. The match engine itself is nothing short of brilliant, ditching the wandering traffic cones of CM08 for fully rendered players and animations that get as detailed as Marseille turns, bicycle kicks, and players hanging their head in shame at a missed opportunity. We couldn't fault the engine's scripting either, with goals that came from a wide variety of attacking opportunities and team formations that retain their shape pretty well, albeit with some bunching when the action gets frantic in the box. All in all though, the engine not only rivals Football Manager's offering from last year; it betters it quite substantially.

This engine is then used in training as well, presenting players with the opportunity to run a variety of drills in real-time. Users can specify everything from which foot a player uses in the shooting drills, to how deep the deliveries should be during crossing drills. The standard training schedule then comes with impressive depth, allowing gamers to mould players with a wide range of specific traits such as making full backs look for overlaps on the wing. To top this all off, the set-piece editor is nothing short of inspired. It's been put together so well that you never feel limited by the options but has also been designed with accessibility in mind, so that you'll be off and running with it after only a few minutes of tinkering.

Don't Shoot The Messenger

Ease of access is a design mantra that has also been applied to the new scouting interface. A global map lays out all the relevant countries and territories, which can then be selected to attribute scouting funds to specific regions. Once money has been injected into a region, your team's knowledge of that territory then increases and you'll receive regular updates that coral all of the newly discovered players from that region. It's a simple but effective way of keeping all of your scouting information in one place and the updates are pretty good at throwing up the odd gem as well, such as Napoli's Marek Hamsik (who's a snip at around £14 million) and AEK Athens' 18 year-old wonderkid, Panagiotis Tachtsidis (for a mere £1.6 million).

The only downside to the scouting network, though, is that the balancing was a little off in the build we played where funding was concerned. Playing as a top four Premiership club, we could easily invest the maximum amount in most of the territories and reap the rewards. With this in mind, we sincerely hope that BGS can tweak the economy of the system so that players have to make strategic decisions as to where they want to invest their funds, otherwise the network doesn't offer much of a challenge and becomes a bit two dimensional as a result.

What we've seen of CM10 so far is very encouraging indeed and we're looking forward to stretching the game's legs with a full review next month. There will be more to come in the full release that we've not had the opportunity to test here, such as the CM Season Live function (which allows players to download data from real-world football results), but the new 3D match engine, training options, and scouting interface certainly get two thumbs up from us.