When you make a big trade and stake the club’s fortunes on this new, young striker you’ve gambled on, you’re naturally going to be invested every time they take the field. It’s the stories that you “write” as you play that are compelling. Here’s what you need to achieve with them or you’re going to be fired”. The story itself isn’t much more than “you’re the manager of the team now. The thing that has always been compelling about Football Manager is the emergent narrative. This is probably all the Switch can handle at this stage (and in fairness, the improvements that you see to gameday action etc on PC/consoles aren’t that much better), but it’s enough that you’ll be caring about your team within a few matches of taking over the management of them. Menus and displays all look basically the same.
The gameday replays that allow you to watch your team in action seem like they are a carbon copy of last year. While the information is better organised, presented, and interactive, the depth of information that you’ll be wading through has not changed an iota. Football Manager has incredible depths of information, and it can’t have been easy to organise all of that into an intuitive UI, but that’s what the development team has done here, and hats off to them. With this one, you can navigate easily around using simple button presses, and the control stick to select “categories” of actions that you want to interact with. Last year’s edition of the game gave us a “virtual cursor” for controller input and it was an absolute and unrelenting pain to use. By adopting the same basic interface as the console edition of the game (available on Xbox etc), this is the first time I’ve been able to play the game without feeling like I need to undock my console and use the touch screen. That’s what’s changed with Football Manager Touch 2023. The UI was tweaked from one game to the next, but the developers never quite made it ideal to play with a controller, making the game all but pointless on the big TV. Most significantly, it didn’t feel like the series was actually getting better. Not “just a roster update”-thin, as there had always been some tweaking to the user interface, AI and features to try and make it more playable, but nonetheless thin. I love the series a great deal and will inevitably spend dozens of hours with each year’s iteration trying to carefully manage the weakest team that I can find in the 6 th division of the English football league all the way to the EPL, but the reality is that the updates from one iteration to the next have been pretty thin. It has been getting progressively more difficult to talk about the Football Manager Touch releases on the Switch.
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