Premier Manager 2005-2006

"Seriously lacks some important things"

I have to start this review by saying that I'm not much of a fan of this type of game, so it is possible that I slightly under-rate it.

However, as soon you start playing this game you will notice how flawed it actually is. This will be a strange thing to say, considering you will be playing this on an hand-held console, but this appears to be the only game for this console I've ever seen that featured loading times, and they seem to appear a lot of times between almost all the actions that you will be trying to perform.

One of the main actions will include picking your own options in a variety of conversations with many different people (who may range from the president of your club up to some negotiations with single players), and this is performed by pressing a direction plus A, and each direction takes you to a different phrase your "character" would use on that particular situation.

Also, you will be able to search for players that you could possibly want to buy, but since the options are very limited (you can't search by name, only by age, position, side, value, status and location) it turns out quite hard to find a specific player.

You can also pick the training programs that your team will be following across the season, make decisions that will obviously interfere a lot on your team's future and even manage the tactics before (or during) a certain match. At first you may have trouble even performing small operations like picking an option on a menu (and I have to admit it, the controls around here aren't very simple!), but once you get around that problem perhaps the game will even turn more enjoyable.

That doesn't still make up for the excess of loading times in the game or the huge amount of time you will spend by having to look at the soccer field during the matches. Unlike in some soccer strategy games, this one doesn't seem to give you the chance to skip the unimportant parts of the match, meaning that a player is really supposed to watch the screen while is team is just passing balls around. Ok, you can do substitutions or change the tactics, but you won't generally need to.

Now, into one of the most important details in this kind of game... You are able to play in the leagues of England, Italy, Spain, Germany and France, each of them split onto 2 different divisions. This enables you to play with a lot of teams, each of them having the exact players they feature in real life, and those players even have their correct names, unlike what happened in some other games.

Concerning the graphics, I would have to say they fit the game, almost everything can be seen clearly, except for the faces of the characters that you get to see across the game, those are sometimes just a bunch of pixels stuck together. The in-game animations are also (the ones appearing during the matches, I mean) quite good, despite not featuring much action.

About the sound, any rumors of music in this game are clearly fake, as it features nothing more than some really uninteresting background sounds, apart from the usual sound effects that can be heard when you pick any choices.

All these features make me think about who should play this game. Personally I think that only soccer simulation fans who want an updated version of one of those products to their console will enjoy it, but the final choice is really up to the player.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/05