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Football Manager Handheld Mini Review
Jon Wilcox
18/04/2006
Sports Interactive take their management sim over to PSP, but can it fulfil expectations...
There's little doubt that since their breakaway with Eidos two years ago, Sports Interactive has managed to take a lot of its fans over to the Football Manager brand. Now in its second year, the franchise is branching out with appearances not only on PC, but also Xbox 360, and PSP. Creating a football management sim for the PSP certainly sounds like a great idea, especially if it can capture the addictive qualities of its home-based big brother and merge it into an engaging pick-up-and-play title as per a standard portable game. So does Football Manager Handheld achieve this?
In short, yes it does, but not without the game losing several features that fans of the series have become accustomed to in recent iterations. Gamers are also restricted with a thirty season career, and a squad of up to thirty-six players.
Nineteen leagues from seven European countries, including the English, French, German, and Italian premiers (together with their respective lower divisions), are available to play, which is more than enough to satisfy Football Manager fans on the move. From there, the game is pure Football Manager with the core gameplay that's to be expected in such a title: addictive, immersive, and proving gamers to lead their team out in the most accurate football management experience currently available.
Since Football Manager is such a text-reliant title, it's obviously imperative that the characters are easily legible on the PSP screen; and for the most part it does do this successfully. The menu text, team text, and the commentary all avoid giving you too much eye strain although it'd dependant on the strip colours of the respective teams. Man Utd's white on red stands out really well, which goes for a lot of colour combinations in the game. There are however, certain teams (and I'm thinking of you, CSKA Moscow) where the contrast is too much, and causes your eyes to go a little bit...funny.
With many of the relative new features of Football Manager removed, the game very much harks back to 'days gone by', when 2D match engines and reserve teams were just a glint in a Sports Interactive designer's eye.
Obviously with its roots on a mouse/keyboard based PC, it's been imperative for Sports Interactive to create an easy to navigate and efficient control system, one that preferably lacks a fiddly cursor. In Football Manager Handheld, the navigation is mapped to each of the PSP's face buttons and d-pad, with the analogue 'nipple' useful for skipping to the bottom of lists in a single push and the shoulder buttons acting as back/forward options. From these buttons, players can quickly access most of the information within a couple of presses, making the game flow quite naturally once you've actually got use to it.
Playing Football Manager Handheld will almost certainly feel like a strange nostalgic trip for football management sim veterans thanks to its more streamlined 'raw' gameplay, which some (especially those who like their control over reserve teams and all the other latest features) may be disappointed with. Such gamers should perhaps remember the context in which Football Manager Handheld has been created. If it's the super-deluxe take control of absolutely everything experience you're after, get the game on a home platform. If however you want to hammer Arsenal whilst stuck in a traffic jam, then this is the version to get. It's simple enough to whiz through a season in a matter of hours, and with many of the more recent gameplay features omitted, Football Manager Handheld will almost certainly appeal to those who preferred the 'good ol' days' of Sports Interactive's Championship Manager.
The focus of the game is solely on an engaging single-player experience, and doesn't feature any multiplayer options, but for once there's very little to be gained if the game had such an option anyway. The focus of the game was to provide players with as close an experience to the PC and Xbox 360 on PSP, and in no uncertain terms, Sports Interactive has achieved just that. There's perhaps one prophetic result in the game that might raise an eyebrow or two, and that's England winning the World Cup...though we're sure that's down to SI's comprehensive database than a bias on their preferred winner.
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