Football Manager 2006

THE GOOD:
Football Manager 2006 is one of the best Football management games there are. There are over 40 different countries to manage including place like India, Singapore, Azerbiajan and many more obscure countries to manage in, as well as the globally known countries, like England, Spain, Italy, Germany and so on. There is alot of depth in this game, for example, in England you can manage the top teams in the country, or try and rescue your team from being relegated for the Nationwide North division. The database holds over 100,000 players and a large amount of teams as well. There is always a different challenge on FM06. In Football Manager 2006, the more and more seasons you complete on your game, the more and more interesting it becomes. It feels quite nice seeing a young a lad that you were impressed by from the U18 side at your club, as a world class player in 2011. It also feels a like a great achievement when you sign a nobody player for a dirt cheap price,...

THE GOOD:
Where can I start? I feel this is a game for almost everyone. When I started playing it I new nothing about football but now I can name the Dinamo Kiev starting line up as the gameplay and detail drew me in. FM 06 is more like an FM 05 update rather than a sequel which is a lot better than trying to change something thats near enough perfect. New features include Half-time and Full time team talks for you to tell your team and players how you feel about their performance, Manager snapshots for rounded up information on fixtures and the league table, player AI is improved with your players complaining about not getting played or if they feel you are not giving the team enough credit and an other main feature is a lovely new skin and the options to change back to the FM 05 skin for a more retro vibe.

As with the last Football Manager, there is a huge amount of downloadable content such as skins, facepacks, bagdes, kits and regular update patches which...

THE GOOD:
- Literally Infinite Lifespan
- Huge database containing thousands of manageable clubs
- Virtually all aspects of real life management are involved

THE BAD:
- Very slow pace early on in the game
- Contains many bugs, though this will be fixed by future patches
- Fans of simple games should steer clear, as they may find the scope of this game daunting

SUMMARY:

Football Manager 2006 offers the chance to take on the roll of a manager of a football team of their choice, from over 100 fully licensed leagues. In order to succeed, you must train your players, set them individual and team tactics, make comments to the media, play mind games with other managers and utilise the transfer market to full effect.



The game is heavily text based, with its only real graphical element being the 2D match engine on which you...

THE GOOD:

Accurate names/teams.

Level of depth of managerial choices.

THE BAD:

AI.

Speed of gameplay.

Slowdown if you choose many leagues.

SUMMARY:
First off, you should know this is a review for people wanting to know what its like from a first time managerial game player. So if you are an old hand at these types of games you may well smirk at my inferiority, but just be quiet.

One thing that you'd expect but I was still really pleased by was the amount of player characteristics, and the accuracy of the characteristics. I played with Oxford first as they are my home team, they are in the 4th english league (League 2) so by no means are a 'big' team. Yet the players that are fast runners but have little accuracy in their shooting skills, genuinely are fairly well represented, although not perfectly.

There is also a great amount of options available to you such as...