Football manager has always been an interesting looking beast. All the excitement of simulating seasons of football, none of that pesky excitement of playing football. It wasn’t something that appealed to me, until Football Manager Touch 18 came to Switch, that piqued the curiosity.

As this was my first experience of a football manager game, I knew I was going to have a bit of a climb to learn the ropes, but boy the game doesn’t help with this.

Football Manager kicks in with you are being able to grab a team or create one. Once you customise your manager, you then kick straight into your first season and hit the ground running. The seasons basically consist of watching a calendar move day to fay, and it will stop when an event takes place. This is from agents making offers, to games, to news reports they vary from something happened to a club, to international team beat another one, to reports that a player isn’t happy at your club.

When games pop up, you pick your team including the bench. Then you can either skip the match, but set a strategy for your Assistant Coach to watching the game play out. Instead of the game speeding up, like most football games, instead it uses a real time click, but only shows you the highlights, such as someone getting close to a good chance in one of the boxes. You can switch out players, or change strategies throughout the game, but that’s all the control you have.

Personally after a few games, I found myself preferring to skip the matches, and set a vague strategy that competes with the information you’re given about the other club. This basically makes it a stats game, and it is a lot of fun as you start to make your way out the overwhelming stages.

An example of why it got frustrating watching the highlights was in my first game. The Nix were battling WSW, and Burns scored two goals. Both goals were disallowed due to offside, WSW scored one, not called offside, so I lost 1-0. With no actual control over things like your player being onside, this was annoying.

The biggest issue is the way it throws you straight into the calendar. A 5-minute tutorial, even if it was a separate option would have been a lot easier for someone new to the series. Especially as the first entry on a new console, there is a fair chance people will be checking it out for the first time.

I went through a lot of harsh learning phases, like skipping through the daily events happening too fast and missing important information like people making offers to your players. Not knowing how to check contracts can be hard, and I accidentally lost a lot of players at the end of the first season.

The bulk of your strategy will be coming from a menu that pops in from the right, but this is something I spent hours not playing. This is where you can do the games more advanced features like renewing contracts, or offering them to others.

Input is annoying too, as you move a mouse around the screen or touch the screen, but thanks to small buttons, touch can be very frustrating. Using the mouse feels slow and clunky as well, so there isn’t a clear winner there. On top of that I found the game chugged and struggled a fair bit throughout.

Yet despite its flaws, I started to get my rhythm in the game, and enjoy it. Being able to pick and put down as needed makes it perfect for the Switch, as once you’re invested in your career you can pop it on between other games, or while watching TV.

Football Manager Touch 2018 isn’t a perfect game for Switch, and is not remotely welcoming to newcomers, but there is a lot of fun to be had if you can bear grinding through the teething stages. There is one thing to know, and that is the game will let you know how little you know about football.

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Football Manager Touch (Switch) Review
Game Details

Released: March 2018
Rating: PG
Platforms: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Strategy
Developer: SEGA
Publisher: SEGA</p

Gameplay
Graphics
Audio
Replayability
Reader Rating0 Votes
3.5
Final Verdict
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