Football Manager 2019

Pros

• Greatly improved training systems
• Intuitive menu designs
• One of the best management sims

Cons

• Garish menu color scheme
• Relatively high barrier to entry

While the main competition in the video game football genre may be FIFA and Pro Evolution, the Football Manager series has managed to carve out its own specialized fan base more interested in the fundamentals of franchise management than in the heroic feats out on the field. The 2019 edition is a pretty substantial evolution for the series, and that's a good thing considering that Football Manager is arguably one of the best and most sophisticated sports management simulators ever.

This may be a management sim, but success is still determined out on the field. The new training systems are a significant improvement, and primarily that comes from a simplification of the fundamentals. You can quickly and automatically adjust your team tactics and training schedules to accommodate the style of your favorite league player. That's a choice that makes this the most accessible entry to newcomers, but more experienced Football Manager fans will still find the depth to micromanage every inch of their team's training schedules and tactical focus. In every major respect, this is a game that gives as much as you're ready to put in. It just doesn't have the same barrier to entry it once did, and what barrier still remains is alleviated by the presence of new miniature tutorial videos.

With management games like Football Manager, the core level of engagement often comes down to how satisfying the results are of digging deeper into the systems, and this entry really sticks the landing there. The training schedule, for instance, gives you a truly breathtaking number of options. And while the actual alteration of a training schedule largely plays out as a purely numerical affair, the way all these options operate with one another make it satisfying to sketch out your schedule on a scale of months or even years while still giving you the option to tweak your schedule on a game by game basis.

This game really sticks it in terms of interface design as well. This is still a game that's primarily defined by its menus, but these menus are smarter than ever before. Rarely will you find yourself questioning the inexplicable placement of a particular sub-menu or wondering about what a certain icon means. You'll spend most of your time still messing around with menus, it's just that you'll spend less of your time lost in menus.

If you're a long term fan of Football Manager, the 2019 edition is a no brainer. It builds out some of the most neglected aspects of the series and expands them in ways that really benefit the core mechanics already in place. If you've always been interested by the operations of management in the big leagues but are intimidated by the inaccessible design of older entries in the series, you won't find a better time to get involved and test your skills as a team manager.

Pros

• Greatly improved training systems
• Intuitive menu designs
• One of the best management sims

Cons

• Garish menu color scheme
• Relatively high barrier to entry