Football Manager 2021 Review

Football Manager 2021 Review
GameCentral reviews the new Football Manager game and finds out that this has been a good year for football after all.

Notwithstanding the challenge of keeping an annual release fresh and appealing, Sports Interactive, the developer of the Football Manager series, has this year had to contend with a global pandemic, ahead of the release of Football Manager 2021.
It was a challenge the Sports Interactive developers took in their stride and although Football Manager 2021 releases a little later than it did in 2019, it brings a host of improvements that will make your life in the dugout more interactive, more immersive, and much more true to life.
Unlike Football Manager 2020, which led on the introduction of the development centre feature, Football Manager 2021 has focused less on big ticket features and more on ease of access and quality of life tweaks to help you manage a football club.
The question then, is whether this changes the strategy and approach to the game or whether it mainly improves the user experience. The answer is a bit of both.
For anyone who logged 100 hours and more of recent versions of Football Manager, the majority of what you actually did beyond the initial first few hours may have become little more than habit, and felt like you were going through the motions.

This is what a lot of Football Manager 2021 tries to overhaul.

Aspects like team talks and player interactions had veterans of the game find a tried and tested formula that they knew would always give their team a quick morale boost, whether that was through training well or telling them they could ‘make the difference’ before a match.

Sports Interactive director Miles Jacobson already discussed how the wealth of new body language options changes how you interact with your team but is it enough to completely change your approach?

After extensive play of Football Manager 2021 the answer is… nearly. We told our assistant manager to pretty much do nothing, so as to give the upheaval of press conferences and team talks as much of a chance as possible to breathe new life into our save. After all, press conferences have been a particular gripe of ours for a long time.

However, once you figure out what works – the ‘encourage’ shout seems to do what ‘demand more’ did on previous Football Managers – it feels like it could become automatic again, leaving those not keen on getting fully immersed in a save to revert back to a muscle memory approach to morale-building strategy.
For those who really take their time and delve deep into how each one of their players reacts, being able to put an arm around a favourite and boost their confidence will be welcome. We’re just not sure what percentage of Football Manager ’s userbase gets that granular.
But that is part of the challenge Sports Interactive faces every year. As Jacobson said, this is a series that has to appeal to new players, a mid-core (people that play for 100 to 200 hours), and the hardcore who spend way longer with the game.
New players will find it initially overwhelming but the inductions and tool tips do a great job of walking that group through everything available to them as a first-time Football Manager. The mid-core might also be shown features they didn’t initially notice – having the option to ask an agent about a player’s availability, for example, is new and nicely tucked away and shows there is something for all levels.

That said, this is the first Football Manager in quite some time without a real headline new feature. Some could argue the recruitment meetings prior to a transfer window counts as one but this didn’t feel like a new feature, more an alternative approach to an already existing process. Truth be told, it only took a few transfer windows for us to skip the meeting and continue scouting as we always had, but of course some will prefer the novelty of the recruitment meetings.
Football Manager 2021’s match engine has undergone significant changes this year, something Sports Interactive has been eager to point out. Alongside updates to things like player animations and the general fluidity of a match, we were told decision-making would be one of the key differences you would notice.

https://www.onfeetnation.com/profiles/blogs/football-manager-2019-review
https://caribbeanfever.com/profiles/blogs/football-manager-2019-review
http://recampus.ning.com/profiles/blogs/football-manager-2019-review
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At its core, Football Manager is a stats-lover’s dream. Everything from the ground up is built on numbers. Everything you see on the pitch is the result of hundreds of interactions between those numbers and decisions being made by your players.
As Sports Interactive calls them, these are ‘slices’ and occur every quarter of a second. The difference this year is that players can change their decision mid-slice, depending on the context of the situation. It is a significant change and one that should help drive the realism of matches for both attackers and defenders.
Football Manager has never stood out for its aesthetics and the 3D engine can still look dated, even if it has its charm, but it’s the animations that really come to the fore in Football Manager 2021.
From little touches in tight spaces and off-the-ball movement to the massively improved variety of finishes we’ve seen our strikers employ, it’s made Football Manager feel like a vastly more realistic simulation of football. Goalkeeper animations still need work but the overall feedback the match engine animations now provide is much more satisfying.
It’s the variety across the board that gives Football Manager 2021 such a refreshing feel. It might turn out that 100+ hours into a save old habits set in and your decision-making is automatic but we’ve found the new layouts for press conferences and team talks very appealing and the greater array of responses and body language actions interesting.
If we had to make a prediction we think press conferences will fall by the wayside and ‘send assistant’ will be the de facto choice of the Football Manager 2021 player but it’s encouraging that once again the developers have recognised a feature that has turned stale and re-energised it. As ever though, some will endorse this change and add another substantial layer of immersion to their saveSomething e feel will be universally loved is the expanded matchday experience. From its appearance to the array of stats that come with the presentation of each match, it has neatly knotted the screenflow together and made matchdays much more exciting.Pre-match tacal briefings are now incorporated into the screenflow of game day, the key stats are laid out for you to expand and study, social media reaction fits neatly alongside, and the league table and other fixtures from around the grounds make up an all-encompassing presentation.