Highly addictive, but also high on downpoints
The last CM game I played was like the 2000/01 season I think. The thing is that I never have been a big soccer fan. It was mostly the bronze Sweden (my home country) took in the World Cup of 1994 that sparked my interest. I firstly tried a Fifa soccer game but thought the controls and mostly everything about it sucked. But as the statistics nerd I am I found out that a manager game was my thing.
So about 10 years since I last came in close combat with a soccer manager game and for the sole reason that I for the last bunch of months not have been able to find any new interesting games to play, I picked up this. So, what has changed in 10 years then. I can say - a little, but really not much. And that is both good and bad.
Now the name of the series is nowadays Football Manager, the developers are still Sports Interactive and the game are still, mostly, addictive as hell.
New for me are the choice to see the games played with an build-in 3D engine, but you can still choose to play old style text messages. No voice commentary though. By the way this game completely lacks sound. Because of low specs on graphic and no sound this game can be played on a very low-end comp. (if you still have a descent amount of RAM that is, and some space left on your HD).
A nice little thing is the choice to have a picture of your created manager. A pic of yourself, some real life celeb or your pet cat - the choice is yours.
You can still have multiple managers and can still take control of either club - or national teams. The teams and leagues are more than ever. You can choose to have all leagues on (and then have to wait for several minutes for the game to process all games before you can continue on playing) or just the league or country you have your manager in.
The economy part is more complex and if you manage teams in lower divisions you have to really check things like your players wages - because you can now also get sacked if you can't control a teams finances.
Also you can sign staff - like trainers and scouts. And you then choose where to place your scouts (national or international), which players to scout for future buying purpose. Choose what areas your trainers should specialize in and what kind of skills your players need to improve.
You also have stuff like staff- and player-meetings and interact with the press. You can choose to send your assistant manager for the press meetings but the risk is that he will say crap that you will not agree with. Your choice.
Really, all the features and content would really make an inexperienced player to have a hard time learning everything that is FM 2012. But there is an tutorial and it is really needed.
Myself, I had not so much trouble to get the hang of things, despite my 10 years of absence. Much of the basics from the old times are still left and the features that was new for me, was easy to catch on mostly because a high interest in learning them.
So, I choosed to take on a team (Reading - no real reason) in the worlds best second division - The Championship. I managed to get promoted in my first season and made a solid 10th spot in the Premier League the next season. But now in my 4th season with the team I have spotted some annoyances with the game I can't overlook. My start of the 14/15 season was horrible in the PL - four clear losses. But I do well in the Euro Cup and I have just now reached the quarter in the FA Cup.
The team has also had an unbeaten streak in the PL and is now at 12th spot. Still almost every player on my squad complain about the team underachieving and my club's owner has called me to a meeting and told me that I better start winning matches - after I have had four straight victories! I consider stuff like this to be a programming glitch and also the fact that every result you do in other competitions other than the leauge does not seem to matter much. This has put me off a little.
The game also is really annoying when suddenly it decides that your team must have a performance slump. I have read about FM doing this to you and for me it started mostly in my 3rd season. Suddenly it is like whatever you do leads to nothing and you can just look on in disbelief when your team plays like a bunch of crap. Different players, different starting tactics - nothing really works. And when nothing else works I just let my manager take a vacation and let the game autoplay. Sometimes load and reload several times before I get a descent result. And that is not how I want to play.
Another thing is the horrible translation. It seems like they have used an online translator or something, at least for swedish. It leads to equal amounts of laughs and facepalms.
But the fact that I have played this damn game for more than a week in real life time must mean that it has something. I have yet faced a game-breaking issue, just some annoyances. This game has the term "long-lasting value" plastered all over it. I do not know how many seasons you can play before the huge amount of data will make the game crash or at least have saving/loading issues.
If you have FM 2011 you probably can skip this unless you want the updated player database. Everyone else who has a tad interest in soccer management, statistics and have been away from this kind of games for a while, like me - get this!