Starting out on the PlayStation in 1999, LMA Manager has appeared in one form or another nearly every year since. In that time, the series has made the jump from consoles to PC, and it was also one of the first football management games to offer a full 3D match engine. Now making its first appearance on the Xbox 360, LMA Manager 2007 offers new features such as online squad updates, league match highlights, and new data for the African, Asian, Australian, and American leagues.

Like its predecessors, LMA Manager 2007 is geared towards the management novice, letting you customise the game as you want to play it and even strip management down to its core components. If you want the complete experience, you can opt to take care of training and financial duties, but if you want your focus to remain on the human resources of the club, you can choose to delegate the other aspects to the computer's artificial intelligence. You can streamline the experience even more by choosing to skip preseason match warm-ups and get stuck into the main season from the off.

LMA Manager's greatest strength is a beautifully presented menu system that's easy to navigate.

LMA's career mode offers up a 20-year stint as a professional football club manager. At the beginning of your career, you need to create a manager who will represent you from the sidelines. There are 15 preset characters to choose from, and you can tweak face, hair, and outfits to finalise your avatar. As well as tailoring the overall game, you can choose how difficult you want it to be. The expert mode is intended for those who have knowledge of the game, as it will hide overall rating information for players. While fans of real-life clubs will probably know their players inside out, they will still need to use scouts and their own judgment to assess the quality of potential new signings to the club. Other modes make it easier by automating some of the micro-management options.

Luckily, processing information in LMA Manager is never a problem. LMA's greatest strength is its presentation, with information split up into nine main menus, each with submenus underneath. The interface has been built nicely around the control pad, so shoulder buttons are used to scroll through main menus, and the triggers flip through the submenus. While this often results in jumping back and forth, you can always find the information you need, and once you get used to the layout, it all becomes second nature. The strong layout of the menus is accentuated by the Xbox 360's high-definition outputs, which keep all the details crisp enough from normal viewing distance. The game takes a hit in terms of text intelligibility in standard definition, although the 3D match engine looks great in both. The only bad point about the presentation is the single music track from Snow Patrol, which soon becomes repetitive. It's a shame that Codemasters didn't support custom soundtracks, especially given the amount of time spent looking at menus. It's also worth noting that you don't need to have a hard drive to play LMA Manager 2007 on the Xbox 360, unlike Football Manager 2006 which required one. However, you'll still need to have a memory card to save your games.

The match engine has been a big selling point in past LMA games, and the 2007 version is under even greater scrutiny thanks to high-definition Xbox 360 and PC versions. While some people swear by the 2D top-down match reports, or even just plain text commentaries, LMA's match engine does in fact help you respond to in-game developments in an effective manner. You can issue commands to your team on the fly by pressing buttons on the control pad, and you can hear them being barked at your team by the manager on the sidelines. There are shortcuts for attacking and defensive play, and you can react to offensive and defensive opportunities by initiating a long ball or playing cautiously. You can also switch your formation and make substitutions from a separate menu at any time. These 10-15 minute matches boast audio recordings taken from real matches, but unfortunately there's no club-specific chanting to be heard.

While the 3D match engine has its faults, it makes for a nice break from all the menus and statistics.

While you certainly won't want to watch every game at full speed, you can choose to speed up the action, while a trail on the ball can be added so you can keep tabs on what’s happening. Among the camera options available, there's an authentic manager's view from the sidelines and a more strategically advantageous perspective through a TV camera or overhead position. While the match engine looks great, with slick graphics and stadium details, there are occasional glitches. Individual players seem to move with their own agenda instead of playing as part of a team. When long passes are made, the receiving player will often appear completely oblivious, and instead of them collecting the ball it will hit them and take a deflection.

On the AI side, players will occasionally put the ball out of play when under no pressure at all, and goalkeepers seem incredibly reticent to come out of the box. There are also missing frames of animation, with players jumping up immediately after making a sliding tackle. In terms of scoring, goals are often scored in spectacular but unrealistic fashion, with a high proportion coming from defenders and players making solo runs.