Review written April 12 2004
Incase you hadn't already known, this game puts you in charge of club from many leagues. You pick the team, buy the players, sack the staff and a whole lot more. But I'll go into further detail of that in a minute.
The basic gameplay is excellent. I've been playing Championship Manager for 6 years now, and there are only a few days when I haven't played it. The games are addictive as anything, and the easy-to-use interface means that you can play this complex game with ease. You can play this game in different ways, for example, you could take a small team up through the divisions, you could take a big team to bigger things, you could just have a game there for a quick challenge or one to try out new tactics, players and training schedules. I also find that you can play this while doing other things, especially if you don't mind moving slowely through the game. Often I find myself playing on the Xbox, watching a movie or doing my coursework while the game is running on the computer.
Once again, we find that every player at every club from more than 40 leagues are present; all scouted and included. This totals to some 200,000 players in the game, yet alone all the regenerations. The data updates are one of things that makes this game what it is. It is so comprehensive, it's the Oxford Dictionairy of sport/simulation games. The stats for each player have changed since the last game, and we find more suited stats for the players, which have been researched to the max.
The game engine has only had a little tweak since the previous game, but it stills runs very well, and you'll have no problem adapting to it if you've never used one before. In the demo, the 2D Match Engine was quite blocky and sluggish, but this was only a demo and has been fixed. A lot of bugs have been fixed from the previous game, CM4, which was released and shortly followed by an enourmous patch. This, thankfully, hasn't happened with CM03/04, but you can download the data updates like before.
The interaction with your team, staff and the media has developed nicely over the past few games, and now we have a level nearing total realism.
Tactics can now be finely tuned for each team, giving team instructions, and a whole host of player instructions, down to what you want them to do for a free-kick (you could ask them to disrupt the wall for example). Some people have already created tactics that will make you win, no matter how poor you team is, by expoiting the match engine. However, there is nothing better than working hard on a tactic, perfecting it, and watching you team win game after game.
The same happens with training, in which you can create as many schedules as you want, and combine many different sessions. A bar graph is now present which shows the effectiveness of your training schedule within different catagories (Attacking and Fitness for example). It can take quite a while to get your desired result, but getting it right and training up youth to become world class is something you just need to do, again, giving the player some enjoyment.
And isn't that what games are about? Enjoyment?
Transfers are now more detailed, giving you more options on how to obtain a player. Co-ownership has given people the opportunity to share players with other teams, but this can only be done in Italy as far as I can tell. There are more extras to go into transfers, like league goals to pay another £500,000 or whichever.
The staff, finances and fixtures have all been improved, giving more odds and a better look at the finances of your club. Showing you more info than just gate receipts.
Unfortunatly, the Championship Manager series as we know is basically gone, with the contract between Eidos and SiGames coming to an end. Both are going seperate ways, with SiGames creating Football Manager 2005 and Eidos creating Championship Manager 5. To be honest, Eidos have no chance of competing with SiGames this time, since all they have is the name.
But for a finale to a series, you can't get any better.