Football Manager 2006 Review (Xbox 360) By Wriggy

9 / 10
03 May 2006 at 19:06

Review by: Wriggy

It’s the last day of the season. Your three nil down against your biggest rivals and your twenty five minutes away from relegation. You put on your sheepskin coat and put some substitutes on. You score one, two, three and a fourth. You’ve survived relegation, the crowd cheer, you run onto the pitch. The next day you wake up and go to the ground. The chairman comes up to you looking disappointed. He gives you a copy of an email he received. It offers you the job at Real Madrid. Do you accept?

Football Manager is one of the most popular PC games of all time but when I heard it was coming to the Microsoft XBOX 360, I got very excited, very excited indeed even though the game was coming out near the end of the 2005/2006 season.

When I first got the game the first main difference is that starting the game takes five minutes instead of around thirty minutes which is great and when the game is loading it has a quiz style where a question appears with four answers and after a few seconds the answer is revealed which is makes loading times pass quickly. Another difference from the PC versions is that menu’s are done with buttons on the XBOX 360 controller. These are hard to get used to but you get used to it.

You can’t really comment on the graphics but what you can see is good. The players are still little circles with little legs but the ball looks a little rounder. Also, if you have a High Definition Television (HD TV) then you can fit more onto the screen and it looks a lot clearer but normal televisions are alright too.

You can control nearly every club team in the world in a whole load of countries from Manchester United to Accrington Stanley (Who are they?) and from Real Madrid to Exeter City so you can have a new challenge whenever you want.

A feature I like about the game is one where if you take over a club that are favourites to get relegated, then it gives you the feel that you are going to go down and it makes you feel like your actually following the team. Not only does it happen at the bottom, but at the top as well.

I also like how you can save matches and then you can watch them again. Whether it was the game you won seven nil to the game you found the funniest.

XBOX Live is also a very nice feature to the game with lots of online cups and tournaments to win. You can pick a team or upload your own team so the competition is fierce but it’s even fiercer when your playing your friends as your either playing for a laugh or for real.

The achievements on the game are pretty pathetic. There are three easy ones (Sign A Player (1 Gamer Score), Win a Match (2 Gamer Score), Get a Clean Sheet (3 Gamer Score)) and then there’s things like Win the World Cup so a more varied achievements list could have made the game more fun.

Overall, I would recommend this to any football fan as the life span of the game is so long you may not need to buy another game again! If you already have the game for the PC I wouldn’t recommend buying Football Manager 2006 as it is exactly the same game.

If you don’t have a XBOX 360 hard drive then you won’t be able to play this game which is a shame for people who don’t as it is a very good game.

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