FIFA Manager 09

When You're Asked to create a family for your character, you know this isn't a football management game aimed at people who'll pore over transfer lists and scout reports.

FIFA Manager contains a number of things that Football Manager veterans will consider to be extremely gimmicky, such as merchandising and advertising, appointing lawyers and PR people, the aforementioned family and an in-game football quiz. You can even learn how to play golf so as to 'get on' better with your chairman.

On a positive note, the underlying database is fairly impressive in its depth and it's clear there's been a lot of love and attention paid to it. While it might not match Football Manager's depth, it's certainly a challenger in this respect.

As for the matches themselves, there are some new textures, sounds and a new interface, while the tactics are also different. This time out you'll have a bunch of new settings to tweak, like attacking mentality, time wasting and crossing height/frequency. The 3D highlights mode is present and as surprisingly dull as ever, failing to accurately represent what's going on behind the scenes, often leaving you ignorant as to why things happen.

Anyway, if you've played one of the FIFA Manager games before and came away satisfied, you'll love this one. But there's still nothing to tempt away Football Manager devotees - unless you like negotiating advertising deals. There are still too many gimmicks for this series to be taken seriously, some that aren't even accepted by those who prefer this to Sports Interactive's effort. We'd like to see Bright Future focus on improving the in-game engine, scale back the extraneous nonsense and provide a better core game experience.