Player Manager 2

Life for the average football fan is one of unremitting disappointment. There are only so many championships and cups to be won, meaning there are a lot more pissed off football fans than happy ones each season. Alright, so life may be made bearable a couple of times a season by a thumping win against your hated local rivals. But generally, you spend most of your life wondering why you bother turning up every week. Then every summer there's a bout of insane optimism (brought on by too much sun) that leads to the certainty that This Will Be Our Year - a feeling usually long gone either by about September 10th. Or straight after they blow four million quid on bloody Chris Armstrong and sell Nick Barmby.

Lie down on this couch

This is where football management games have a role to play in society -they are there to provide essential psychiatric help to the bitter and twisted follower of the crap football teams of this world. A good game gives you the chance to prove that, if only you were given your chance by the Care In The Community cases who run your club, you could have them challenging for European and World Club honours within the hour. And we've said this over and over (and over) again, but if a game doesn't allow you to choose your own team, much of whatever appeal it might have is already diminished.

Player Manager 2 does not allow you to choose your own club. Depending on how many of you are playing the game (up to four), the clubs that you'll be allocated will be local rivals from the "2nd division" - their up-to-the-minute term for the Endsleigh League ist Division. If there's two, you might get Wolves and Birmingham City, for example. Hold me back, you cry as one.

The great leveller

The second main problem with it is common to any management game that includes an arcade section: if you're crap at the arcade bit, even possessing the finest tactical mind and most wonderful team won't enable you to win. But if you're brilliant at the arcade bit, you can win things with really crap teams - which makes a mockery of the management sections of the game. Sensible World of Soccer strikes a balance between the two by restricting the management side of things to buying and selling players and inventing wacky formations. And when it gets to the pc in 2021, you will be able to decide for yourself whether even this works or not.

Unlike Sensi, Player Manager 2 doesn't even have the arcade bit to help it out -that's cack, too. It's visually stunted; hard to time shots; difficult to control the ball; and corner kicks, free kicks and so on are computer-controlled. (Arh!) And while the day-to-day management options cover everything from ground improvements to signing up schoolboys, the match options are restricted to changing formations and substituting, meaning there's little satisfaction when playing it purely as a management game (something you have to do every three seasons after the age pf 36 anyway). One to avoid.