Championship Manager 2007 Mini Review
Jon Wilcox
20/10/2006
Beautiful Game Studios' third addition to the long-running series arrives - but is it third time lucky...
Berated over the past two years for being a bug-ridden pale-imitation of its glorious days of yesteryear (much like Liverpool Football Club), Championship Manager returns for the third time under the helm of Eidos' Beautiful Game Studios. Promising to offer a much improved experience for players, a claim that also seems to make an annual appearance from Eidos' marketing men, Championship Manager 2007 has a lot to live up to. But with the Champ Man brand bruised and battered, is the franchise back on the road to recovery or does it remain as useless as a couple of Chelsea keepers???
Championship Manager 2007 comes just six months after the release of Championship Manager 2006, resetting the launch of the franchise back to its traditional period in the Autumn. Obviously with such a short turnover between titles, there are bound to be claims and concerns from fans that the game is more of an expansion pack to "last year's" efforts instead of being a complete iteration - but we can hammer through such concerns as Champ Man 2007 is very much its own game. As seems to be the tradition for all annually released franchises, Championship Manager 2007 claims to feature new improvements for gamers to enjoy; however, unlike the case of other such series, this all-new and improved Champ Man is to a certain point, new and improved.
In a franchise so heavily filled with enough numbers as to make a statistician weep with joy, the ability to navigate through the reams of information is perhaps one of the greatest priorities for gamers. It's something that Championship Manager 2007 enjoys to limited success, though the actual design of the interface and the over-emphasis of icons makes it far from being as clear an experience as it should be. The addition of the so-called 'dynamic' side-bar, allowing gamers to create their own shortcut bar, is something that will certainly make navigating through the game a whole lot easier for some of the more inexperienced players and at least sits inconspicuously off-screen unless called for. That said, the saccharine gel design of the interface does need to be looked at; an attempt to evolve the look of the 2006 game, it doesn't make the title look as slick as it should. Interface designs aside, there have been significant improvements to other aspects of the game away from the experience of match day itself. Eidos has taken some pride in announcing that the news and media text sent to a manager's mailbox between matches has been rewritten, making them far less rigid and clinical compared to past instalments. They've almost been brought to life thanks to the re-write, further immersing you into the world of Championship Manager.
No doubt if you've been following the development of the game, you'll have heard that Champ Man 2007 includes a version of the ProZone tool, an application used by top league managers for post-match analysis of a team or player's performance. Essentially added for the franchise's hardcore fanatical fan base, ProZone allows players to go into the most incredible detail of every aspect of game: where tackles were made, who made them, and were they successful; where, when, and who shot at goal; where were free-kicks taken from, and so the list goes on. From there, gamers can make new changes based upon intricate details allowed by ProZone - that is, if they have the sort of passion that defines the very meaning of "obsessive" and "passionate", and god knows that fans of the series are a very dedicated lot. What the ProZone tool allows players to do is further immerse themselves in the world created by Beautiful Game Studios - after all, a version of it is used by the likes of Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, and Steve McLaren. That said, it's also not a mandatory piece of gameplay to get involved in - the amount of data spewed out of the feature is phenomenal and may be even be overload many gamers...the small addition of a rewind button would be have been nice however. We don't really want to sit through that level of information for a second time just to see the passing performance of a single player.
International management makes a return to the franchise after a hiatus, which finally brings the series up to where it quite frankly should be. Even if developers such as Beautiful Game Studios and Sports Interactive don't add one hundred new features to every instalment, the fact is that expansions into new leagues and teams should be a given - so too the option to helm an international side. Something that may divide the fan base however is that players can choose to manage an international side right off the bat - without any need to prove themselves in the domestic arena first. Whether it's part of what appears to be Beautiful Game Studios' strategy to open up the franchise to a wider audience, something that the inclusion of the Club Benefactor option for a second year running seems to suggest, we're not so sure - but it's something that diehards may criticise as a dumbing down of the Champ Man experience. Looking back at the domestic competitions, Championship Manager 2007 has for instance included the English Conference North and South Leagues for the first time, enabling an even greater challenge for players as they try to get the likes of Nuneaton or Bognor Regis Town to the Premiership.
But behind the new features and improvements, does Championship Manager 2007 really succeed in conjuring the illusion of realistic management and immersion? At times, yes it does. Whilst reports of freak 19-1 results have emerged from the fanbase, the number of such occurrences seem to be much lower than BGS' previous instalments, meaning that one potential banana skin has largely been dealt with. That said, we did manage to purchase Bayern Munich's Owen Hargreaves in a £10 million deal - something that seems to stretch the realms of realism given Bayern's attitude's over the summer. Quite honestly, Hargreaves should only have made the move to Old Trafford if we'd spent our season's transfer budget, but in the end he barely dented it. In recent seasons, both Champ Man and its rival have placed an increased emphasis on player-manager interactions, with Team Talks and tailored training sessions. Having such a link to your players in the squad means that an even greater sense of your actions having an effect on the outcome of a game than before - especially with the Team Talks, which really create can affect the outcome of a match, and reinforces the illusion and immersion of the experience.
Something that seems to have plagued the last few instalments in the series is amount of bugs in the system, and it's perhaps with no surprise to say that Championship Manager 2007 does ship with its own set of critters too. Although Beautiful Game Studios has already acknowledged several of these (including confused players reacting to international post-match talks like it was a domestic game, and training schedules changing after a player signs a new contract), it does seem that in the push to ensure the game is released ahead of Football Manager 2007, some sacrifices have been made in bug testing and resolving. That said however, BGS is looking into addressing these issues in the future, so at least hopefully a patch fixing these problems will be release fairly shortly.
It does seem that having failed at the play-off stages in the last two seasons, Championship Manager has finally been promoted back to the premier league of soccer management titles. Beside a subtle evolution of the interface, it's the addition of new features that make Champ Man stand out. The fact that Eidos has made so much of the new ProZone feature hides other noteworthy inclusions such as the re-emergence of international management in the series and a re-writing of the news/media text, creating what can perhaps be best considered the first true Champ Man since Sports Interactive's departure in 2004. The inclusion of a multiplayer mode would be quite nice in 2008's instalment though guys...
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