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Championship Manager 2008 Review
Gwynne Dixon
02/11/2007
Beautiful Game Studios has taken their fourth bite at the Champ Man apple and this time it's a bit juicier...
Since the much publicised split between Eidos and Sports Interactive following Championship Manager 2003/04, it has been a difficult period for the Champ Man series. While SI retained their legendary database and 2D match engine (continuing their work with Sega under the Football Manager banner), the IP for Champ Man was kept by Eidos which had set-up Beautiful Game Studios to develop all future Champ Man games.
It's fair to say that the first few BGS Champ Man games (Champ Man 5, 2006, 2007) had their fair share of football management howlers such as insufferable AI within the 3D game engine, but it finally seems like BGS is getting into the groove. Champ Man 2008 marks a point in the series where the BGS team is really starting to put the pieces of the Champ Man formula together, producing what is by all accounts a fairly solid game. There are even areas where BGS has added some quite unique features that rival the offerings in Football Manager.
But, before you can run you've got to walk, and BGS has certainly done this by shoring up the gameplay basics this year. There is, for example, a fairly extensive database of players with some fairly well represented stats this year. All the big clubs throughout the major footballing continents (i.e. South America and Europe) are impressively represented, with the majority of them boasting a full team of players who can be scouted and bid for. Things do get a bit hazy when you start looking at the less significant footballing areas of the globe (e.g. Oceania, Asia and North America). While most of the minor teams in these regions are listed, there are often no players to interact with or very little talent worth scouting for. Sticking to big clubs and big names is often a sound strategy.
That said, there's still a vast pool of potential signings out there that will definitely keep you searching for a good deal. Additionally, putting in enough search time will yield you a good hand of talented, yet fairly unknown and cheap, candidates. The stats are quite reasonable as well and they reflect the real world of football fairly loyally. Still, while there are touches of character to each player, they just don't quite manage to go beyond the list of bland figures on your screen and come to life. Getting performances and consistency out of your overpaid superstars still requires a good deal of thought and experimentation though, which is enough to keep you interested.
The transfer market also now comes with added realism. There were a number of occasions where AI teams and players reacted quite intelligently to my dabbling in the market. After haggling Galatasaray down from £13 million to just £12m for one of their stars, I then decided to cancel the offer. When I made the same offer again a couple of weeks later (having realised the error of my ways), Galatasaray notified me that they felt negotiations had broken down and they would accept no less than £16 million. Another example concerns Aston Villa's Ashley Young: initially his agent was demanding a fairly low salary and 'squad rotation' status in the team. When I upped his salary a few thousand and his status to 'key player' (to raise the chances of him signing), I was then told that if the club think he is that valuable then he should get a much higher salary.
Unfortunately, amid this improved AI we did notice one thing that was heinously annoying. This is that your transfer budget appears to lie to you. On our first run through a game we signed two players simultaneously, with the total cost for the two of them coming to exactly the same amount as our transfer budget allowance. However, after signing one of them the board wouldn't let us sign the other as we apparently didn't have the funds. I checked my finances: yes, my budget was £26 million; yes, I'd spent £14m; yes, my other target cost £12m, but I apparently only had £10.5m left. After one tap of 'continue', this then curiously became £11.5m. So, we continued to hunt for talent and eventually found another target for £11.5m, but once again we were denied the transaction due to a lack of funds. Even more bizarrely, after checking our finances following this failed purchase we apparently had £11,400 pounds, although this strangely popped back up to £10.5m again after a 'continue'.
Understandably we were most displeased but, being the rigorous games journalists that we are, we decided to start another game and run through the same procedure. Low and behold, the same bug happened again - it was literally like we had a hole in our pockets. We checked our financial records extensively and we hadn't released any team members (often resulting in compensation payments), so there didn't seem to be any explanation for it. The whole thing was just positively baffling, not to mention annoying. Let's just hope a patch becomes available soon.
One other slight niggle was the fact that when it came to a transfer deadline day, there weren't any last minute negotiations that you could instigate. There were a couple of offers that we'd made on the day prior to deadline and the teams in question didn't reply for a week. Given that the old-skool Champ Man games and FM have featured the last minute transfer rush, it's a little frustrating not to have it included.
Another stalwart feature of Champ Mans during the SI era was the ability to play as multiple managers on one game, effectively providing for multiplayer games. BGS has added this multiplayer feature to Champ Man this year, having not had it during their first three games. While we're certainly pleased to see it included in CM2008, it's something that we would've expected in Champ Man 5, so the addition is a little belated.
Where Champ Man 2008 becomes quite advanced, though, is with its 3D match engine. Firstly, it continues to offer a wide range of views from the classic 'blimp', to TV and isometric camera views. Then there's the fact that you can tailor your highlight viewing to bespoke proportions with checkable options such as team/opposition goals, near misses, penalties, injuries (minor and major), yellow and red cards; the list goes on... Another nice touch to the graphics is how the players are represented. The cone-like appearance of the player icons is a perfectly simplistic way to provide just enough detail for the icons to seem almost lifelike, which really draws you into the game.
However, while there have been huge improvements to the match engine's AI over the last few years, it still behaves slightly unrealistically at times. The set-pieces, for example, were a touch dubious. With freekick opportunities, we often found that our attacking players wouldn't move inside the box prior to a shot being taken. This seems a little strange given the chance for an opportunistic tap-in. Corners were also slightly odd, with there almost invariably being a player who would make a completely unmarked last minute run into the box. This might happen occasionally in the Premiership, but not without a harsh ticking off from Alan Hansen. For it to happen on almost every corner in Champ Man 2008 just didn't seem quite right. Overall, though, the engine ran quite smoothly and it was a decent representation of the beautiful game.
ProZone makes a welcome return and it's yet another of BGS' original adaptations to the Champ Man series. It's basically a hub where you can find tactical breakdowns of recent games. You're treated to detailed breakdowns of what your team did right and wrong, as well as the downfalls/strengths of your opponents. So, if Rooney was particularly good at slotting nifty through balls passed the opposition's defense, then the ProZone data will provide a variety of annotated diagrams which illustrate that. The tactical depth of this feature is impressive in a way that - as the name suggests - obsessive Champ Man fans will appreciate the most.
There are a few neat and original touches throughout the interface that also impressed us. When you scroll over players on your team sheet, for example, you're treated to a small quick reference pop-up that tells you the player's condition, recent form and goal tallies etc. Another nice touch is the ability to choose whether you want to speak to individual players privately, or in front of the whole team during team talks.
On a final note, we also noticed that the option of starting as a national team manager was available in CM2008. This clashes with the Champ Mans of the SI era as well as the FM series, where international jobs have to be applied for when they become available. The option in CM2008 to become a national manager will certainly please some fans who want to manage their country of birth straight out of the box. Nevertheless, we felt that it was a shame to lose out on the intense feeling of reward you get from being offered an international job based on your track record.
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