The flashiest football sim out there is back with more depth, improved core-gameplay and lots and lots of licenses.
You start out the game by making some choices about your own person, such as age, nationality, looks, family and things such as your favorite team or player. Some of those choices will be more and some less important, but all together they add to the feeling of personal involvement the game tries to give you. From here on you have a few important choices to make, as you can choose whether you want to just straight out choose a club to manage (and a national team if you like) or want to start a realistic career.
The latter can be rather displeasing and difficult, depending on where you choose to start. (Start up your own club in the lowest leauge? Or do you want to start out with offers from first-league clubs?) While I heard a lot of people complaining that this can be way too difficult, I would then want you to realize that being the manager of a regional club that's usually found in the lower positions of its league is not a dream job in reality, so don't expect it to be a walk in the park here.
The core game itself is not too much unlike other management sims. You can obviously play around with your formation, your reserve team, youth teams and similar team-related stuff. This is all pretty easy and opposing to the GS review I do have to say that the menus are in general not confusing at all. The only exception I could think of are the trikot numbers which you'd probably expect to change somewhere in the region of your formation-options, but which are actually found in the merchandising area.
Now on that point you might be interested to know that you have the option to take responsibility for the clubs finances as well. Additionally you can create buildings and stuff surrounding your stadium, expand your stadion and build youth camps all around the world.
And obviously you can transfer players twice a year (Winter/Summer break), to build the team of your dreams. This can be rather surreal at some points, because of the "Player exchange" option, which lets you give away players based on the value for other players. (Sometimes under the addition of money). This can greatly reduce the actual amount of money spent, which enables you to sometimes have incredibly surreal transfer periods.
As an example, playing as Werder Bremen you'll have Diego in your starting team. Now he may increase his value to about 60 mio. € in the first season if he does really well and that's the value set in his contract he can be bought for. Now he obviously did not want to change his contract, which is why I just traded him in for Lionel Messi, effectivley paying an additional 5 mio. bucks.
This is just highly unlikely.
But thats actually not what the game aspires to be in my opinion. EA Sports always made "fanboy-games", which let you play with out-of-order teams if you played your cards right and let you just have fun.
And that's what the game delivers: Fun. Whether you buy excellent players, develop talents (which will have their talent displayed in stars, to show how quickly they develop) or just hope your current team gets strong enough on its own (bad option ;) ), the game delivers what you want.
Also there's the possibility of offline-multiplayer, which lets up to 4 peeps take control of a club and plays out like the usual career mostly. (With 4 players it often looses some of its charm as you have to wait extremely long till your turn comes around)
Options such as player careers and 3D-Mode are included and especially the 3D mode looks pretty good, but honestly none of this is needed and I know only very few people that use the 3D mode on a regular basis, not to mention the player career mode. The only not really necessary feature you WILL enjoy is the option to choose your own music folder from which the game will then play your mp3s.
To wrap it up, I'd suggest you to get a hold of this game, which is highly addictive and delivers a great long term experience. The game is so extensive that I probably missed half of the great stuff it delivers in this review, but still it should hopefully have given you enough of an impression to understand the great game EA created here.
So if you are not interested in training the Bumbaluga Sharks or some creepy team nobody has ever heard of and are interested in actually seeing the faces of the players at times, get FIFA manager.