When you first begin a game of Football Manager Handheld, you can immediately choose just about any professional club to manage. This includes all the popular clubs from countries like Germany, Holland, Scotland and Spain. Choosing a larger team seems like the logical decision but it’s important to note that the bigger and more successful a team is the more you will be expected to achieve. If you choose a less popular team then the expectations won’t be as high. The advantage to this is that every game turns out differently.
There is a surprising amount of depth in this game.
Once you’ve selected your team, the game sets up a new file and you’re taken to a home screen which is where most of your management will take place. It’s worth noting that when you’re first setting up your new team, it takes about a minute and a half to set it all up, but this is something that only happens once. The home screen displays the standings of your team, the upcoming fixture and recent results. From this screen you can also scout for players, check out the hall of fame and execute plenty of other commands.
The menu is context sensitive, so there isn’t that much scrolling but it would have been easier if the home button had a short cut as well. All of the menus are initially very daunting but once you get used too them you’ll fly through them because they are very easy to navigate. You’ll need to do a lot of tweaking before and after the match to try and stay on top of things. The game doesn’t just track your matches though and before you even play a match you may be able to watch the form of other teams or other players. It really is absolutely astounding just how much detail the statistics present.
Before a match begins, you need to choose your squad members. The game presents a condition report on the players, as well as their financial value to the club. By clicking on each player you can see there individual statistics. The individual statistics are broken up into three columns including technical, mental and physical and the game assigns each player a rank out of twenty for the attributes under these headings. All you have to do is go down the list of players and choose which position they should play in.
This is a vital screen, you just don't know it yet.
After this is done, the game proceeds to the match. The game provides text based commentary and the score is displayed up the top of the screen. At any time you can pause the game and view stats, action zones and player ratings. You wouldn’t think it but the text based commentary is surprisingly easy to understand and I know when my team first scored a goal I was extremely excited. You can also change the speed of the game, so if you want to watch what is happening then you can slow it down but if you just want to know the end result then you can set the speed to very fast. The idea of getting text based commentary rather than an actual video of the game in action may seem like a bad idea, but in my very first match I lost 3-1 to Yeovil at the end of July, on a 22 degree day in the drizzle. When you’ve as much detail as Football Manager Handheld provides you with you don’t really need a large visualization.
Graphically there isn’t much to say about the game except the menus are clean and very easy to understand. The menus will be initially very daunting though but don’t take long to get used too. The sound is extremely basic, actually that’s probably an under statement, the sound is all but non existent. Occasionally you’ll hear the sound of a click when you’re navigating through some of the menus but that is literally all that you’ll hear.
The game itself should last an extremely long amount of time. Because there is such a large amount of options, there is basically never any time where you feel redundant as a manager. This really isn’t the type of game that you can play through lazily because as soon as you keep the same squad or stop looking for new players you will get absolutely pummeled. It is a little disappointing though that the game doesn’t have some sort of multiplayer option. It would have been good to have played a multiplayer match against a friend so we could see which person’s side is better but unfortunately the game doesn’t have multiplayer support.
A difficult decision for anyone.
In terms of options, the PSP version of Football Manager is a little downgraded in comparison to the PC version or the Xbox 360 version, which we’ll be covering in a few days. There are no reserve teams, no player comparisons and no media interaction. However, if you’re into the Football Manager titles and have always wanted to take the series with you then this game is definitely going to be right up your alley. It isn't as content rich as the other versions but it's still a very impressive game.
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