It's not more of the same - too buggy

User Rating: 5 | Football Manager 2014 PC

So it means that the new changes have made the game worse than previous editions... I'm an avid football manager player, started from the early CM versions and have played continuously up until FM 2012, skiped FM2013. As I started playing this, the new engine has brought an improvement to the game visuals and it's interesting but some movements aren't well made and sometimes players look a bit awkard on the pitch, but if only that was the only problem with this game, it would be bareable... This game is tricky to get into, you have to twitch your team tactics and in-game orders unstoppably until you figure out how to get your team to behave (barely!) as a competent unit, but after you figure that out, and how to motivate the team best according to the game system, the game gets very easy, I've managed to win 6/7 straight champions league in FC Porto, and buying talented youth to sell as prized champions gets you rivers of money, that simply also. The main problem to me, as I like to play through until I retire from management, Is that the regen system for this game ( as for the latest installments ) is not very well done... you get regen players with very high potential, great in ball-handling skills, but then they lack immenselly in other important skills, such as injury proneness or consistency or important games... So you get Maradona-like players that can't play two games straight because of injuries, or they get demotivated for apparently no reason, and you have to be always on their back so they will at least drag themselves across the pitch, and that becomes unbearable after a while, what starts as an interesting, easy-going campaign, after a while becomes a boring, time consuming, not fun experience. At least to me that's how it is, FM 14 is the only manager so far that's made me quit playing because I get so frustrated that my team isn't performing well, and although I can accept that my virtual coaching skills may be lacking, I feel that this game has a lot of improvement to be made, the latest changes have modified that game in a way that more-is-less, and unfortunatelly, I can't really bring myself to keep playing, I came to a point that I realised that it's just too buggy to go on... I'm rating it a 5/10 and besides being disapointed by this installment, I really hope SI can get this going on a better direction in the future...

Thanks for the reading, hope my experience is valid for your consideration.