Championship Manager 5

"The name has been stained"

One of the worst kept secrets of last year was the severing of ties between Sports Interactive, The developers of the Championship Manager Series, and Eidos Interactive, who publish the games. Eidos retained the rights to the series whilst Sports Interactive would develop their own game, Football Manager. Needless to say, a rushed put up job was expected when Championship Manager 5 hit the stores in May, and a lot is expected of the series first appearance on the PS2.

Veterans of the series will instantly recognize the interface of CM5. The entire thing has been borrowed from CM4, and we can easily navigate through the game using the various tabs provided. All links are underlined making it easy for us to use and can compensate somewhat for the lack of a mouse and a keyboard. Everything is presented in a flash of colours, with still football related backgrounds which can be alternated between using the options menu.

After a minute or two's gameplay, we can see that CM5 has borrowed practically everything from CM4 from the layout to the options in the menus. CM4 was a major disappointment on release, and harking back to that game when Football Manager is being released is a little worrying to say the least.

One disappointing aspect is that the game is loaded with the stats of the 2004/2005 season - just as It is about to end in real life. This reeks of a rushed job, and is frankly a very poor deal on a major part of the game.

The game itself is functional, diverse and huge in scope just like the original games and it certainly should be. Budding Arsene Wenger's can take control of any teams from many divisions ranging from England to Belgium and to Sweden, and there are fine tuned tactic and training modes to get the best out of your players. When games are played, we are treated to the standard flashing text bars in the middle of the screen and a tilted 2D pitch which helps to illustrate how well your game is playing. Everything is presented in a neat and tidy fashion and CM5 impresses on the basics. But the most important thing is how does the game play?

We pressed on the point earlier, that this is a clone of CM4. But it's a little worse than that. This is essentially a watered down version of CM4, with the good bits taken out. There are little things that we can encounter throughout the game which detract from the experience and which results in it just not feeling like a proper Championship Manager game.

Some of the players appear to be playing in odd positions; well known Centre Forwards are listed as Left Backs in the game whilst a Certain Luton Town striker doesn't appear in the game at all. For some reason, the game is littered with make believe players who make up the numbers in your reserve squad (Like the greyed out players in the original games, yet these ones can be interacted with). Several teams begin the game with outrageous and unrealistic transfer budgets and the games tactics feel very much hit and miss and games themselves seem a very random affair.

There is no option to recruit coaching staff, whilst a glitch results in you being unable to play the Argentinean and Brazilian leagues, and there is no stat for set pieces or penalties for players leaving some tactical decisions useless. A word to Eidos would be to fire their games testers, because they clearly aren't doing their job. I could go on all day to be honest - there are so many little things that slowly begin to add up to anybody who has played the game for even a reasonable length of time and certainly to anyone who has played some of the other games.

As a final pointer, it is very worthwhile to point out that the game is monstrous in terms of saving. It takes a whopping 7K on your memory card to save one game, which will bump up the price of the game considerably because you will need to buy a new memory card - no wonder the game is now massively reduced just three months after its initial release. Not a smart move, Eidos.

This is a gross disappointment to anyone who has waited for this game to be released. What we have here is a cloned version of a game which is two years old - with all the good bits taken out. It doesn't have the feel of a Championship Manager game, it's out of date and the memory card issue make it almost unplayable. With Football Manager and LMA Manager now out, there are massively superior games on the market and I can see no reason why anyone would want to buy this game - yet the kudos of the title may be enough to sway people, which is disappointing because this game is a travesty.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 08/17/05