The football management game has hit the iPhone in the design of a $9.99 app. Football Manager 2011 tries to offer a wealthy football experience to managers away from home, but is this attempt noteworthy?
Football manager 2011 supports 11 competitions and 34 divisions, that ought to satisfy most players. All of the big leagues are included including the Barclay Premier league, Serie A and the Primera division. So it’s finally possible to relive the intensity of a Barca – Madrid match anywhere you go.
Possibilities
Unlike its PC-counterpart, the iPhone version has been made accessible for players of all levels utilizing a simple layout. The big buttons and dropdown-menu style makes it easy to find all the possible options without scratching heads or searching the ever-wider interwebs for guides. This really is however also a fraud, because Football manager 2011 for the mobile market is certainly not much like the true thing.
This becomes especially apparent when managing off-pitch decisions for the club. Scouts for instance can’t be bought and can only just be send to curtain regions, a much cry from the PC version. And finance control is even further dumbed down, here there’s no way to improve the club’s treasure chest or even read in to the numbers, instead the game supplies a simple budget and leaves it at that. On the flip side the game does account fully for unusual events, within my game a wealthy owner took over, granting over 60m in transfer fees, a view of depth.
To finish this part on an optimistic node, as a result of the easy access modes (though bare basics), football manager operates at lightning speed on an iPhone 3GS or 4. This caused it to be very encouraging and addictive to help keep going, despite the possible lack of features found. I finished 4 seasons with my local club in under weekly – a job I never managed with the PC version before.