Category: News

By Michael Coffer 16 Aug 2018

August is a difficult time for football fans, what with the endless gossip pages to scrutinise, those deadline day live blogs to agonisingly refresh and the countless hours it takes to craft the perfect fantasy squad.

It’s also when many supporters come down with a strange disease known as wannabemanageritis. The main symptom is the trance-like involuntary repeating of the words ‘I could do better than {insert the surname of their club’s manager here}’ over and over again. It’s coupled with lots of tutting, and the condition can persist for nine months or so if left untreated.

The most effective cure is to switch on a PC and fire up Football Manager, the behemoth sports sim that gives players the chance to sit in the virtual hot-seat and run the club of their choice, proving they really are a Guardiola-like tactical genius or a wheeler-dealer of Redknapp proportions.

But this remedy proves too complex and overwhelming for some people, with an injection of full-strength FM known to have the side-effect of making heads explode, but fortunately there is a slightly softer alternative which comes in tablet form for both iOS and Android.

Cue Football Manager Touch, which offers the same accuracy and depth minus some of the time-consuming micro-management that has resulted in the main game becoming so bloated and life-consuming. There have been yearly versions of it since 2015, when it was initially known as Football Manager Classic in reference to how it harks back to the good old days of the series (and Championship Manager before it) when the focus was on tactics and transfers.

Don’t be fooled though – being retro-inspired doesn’t make FM Touch simplistic. Far from it. If you do want something basic (and overly easy in my opinion) you need to try the third member of the squad, Football Manager Mobile, which is much more stripped back and faster to play.

No, FM Touch is still very much a monster of a game which, despite the instant result function that lets you see the scores without sitting through long matches, still has the power to suck up many hours of your life.

How far from being a lightweight casual game it is becomes immediately apparent after you complete the set-up phase of choosing which leagues you’ll have in the game and which club you’ll take charge of from the vast array of real-world options (you even get to, slightly bizarrely, decide what your Manager ‘character’ will look like).

As you get comfortable behind your desk, figuratively speaking, you begin to explore some of the dozens, may hundreds, of pages of information contained within the game and you start to grasp the scale of the task ahead of you. Getting familiar with your playing squad and identifying improvements can turn into several hours’ work, with each player being rated on 36 separate attributes.

It should go without saying given how long-established this style of sports sim is, but it’s worth noting at this point that, in line with the main Football Manager game, FM Touch is based around spreadsheets and stats. The only action, so to speak, is watching a 3D representation of your team’s matches. The rest of the time the game is very much static, filled with menus, lists and charts. If that sounds ‘boring’ to you then 1) What are you doing here? and 2) You need to play a different type of footy game.

If you’re prepared to take a leap of faith and use your imagination to bring it alive and give it personality, this version is every bit as immersive and utterly absorbing as Football Manager has always been. There is never a shortage of things to do and decisions to make as you go through the day-to-day running of your club, dealing with contract negotiations, coach reports, training schedules and much more. You can delegate some duties to your virtual assistants but being a make-believe manager is still a big role – more involved and complex than many real-life jobs.

A lot of your time is taken up with those two Ts – tactics and transfers. Winning matches doesn’t just happen by magic, unless you’re very lucky. It takes meticulous planning and analysing as you pick the best formation for your squad, then pick the best player for each position, then give those players detailed instructions for how you want them to play both individually and as a unit. FM Touch’s tactical options are extremely deep, giving you near-infinite possibilities for how to set your team up.

While small improvements to the game’s interface and navigation have been made in this edition which help to marginally enhance the overall experience, some of the screens are still slightly fiddly to use. You have to tap on some small precise areas to pull up the information you want without ending up on a page or pulling up a menu you didn’t want. Despite minor and occasional niggles like these, it’s still a tactician’s dream to have so much freedom to devise that perfect strategy – and of course it continues into the matches when you have to call upon all your shrewdness to achieve victory by switching formations, changing playing styles and making substitutions as needed.

Getting into the transfers area of the game is like diving down a rabbit hole from which you may never escape. It’s easy to lose all sense of time as you set your filters, send your scouts out and scope out the ideal additions to your squad from the game’s massive database. There’s a real buzz to be had from identifying the perfect target, having a bid accepted and then getting through tense talks before coming to a successful conclusion. A nice addition this time is getting a score out of 100 from your scouts on how suitable a signing each player might be, which makes it just that little bit easier to decide who to go for.

FM Touch is a magnificent game in many ways. One of the best things about it is being able to tuck into such a meaty slice of Football Manager anytime, anywhere whether on the daily commute or relaxing in the armchair of an evening. As a huge footy fan and long-time player of Championship/Football Manager, playing such a challenging and satisfying game is one of the very best things you can do on an iPad, or other tablet. So, why then, does this not deserve full marks?

Where the boys stop giving 110 per cent and where I feel as sick as a parrot at the end of the day Brian, is in how this version of Football Manager hasn’t changed much since its arrival in 2015. Now, like Ronaldo and Messi over the past few seasons, it’s had no equals so perhaps hasn’t needed to advance very far – but it means the complaints I had after the first edition still remain. The 3D match engine looks and works better, the tactics are a bit deeper, the game has more polish but there are still a couple of big omissions which I think stop this from going from Premier League regular to global superstar.

First is the near complete lack of any press or media work during the management journey. Sports Interactive boasts that FM Touch allows players to speed through seasons without “the pre-match build up and media fuss” – true, this makes the game quicker to play but it also sucks a lot of fun out of it. Crafting a media image and then using it to your advantage is a big part of a modern football manager’s job, like it or not, and its absence here makes the game feel less authentic.

The other key thing missing is human interaction. There are very few ways to communicate with players and staff at your club, or with rival managers and players. There are no team talks, no cosy chats, no taunts. This, combined with the lack of press conferences and interviews, makes the whole thing a little too passive – like it’s all about the numbers and not the people. It’s like being locked away in your office with no contact with the outside world.

Adding these two wishes into the game would fatten up FM Touch and take away some of the reason for is existing in the first place separate to the main FM game, but they really need to be represented in some way when FM Touch 2019 comes along in November. Leaving them out yet again would be something of an own goal.

It’s another unchallenged trophy-winning season for Sports Interactive’s mini beast but I’m hoping for something just a bit more next time to stop this series getting stale. 

Just over a year ago I wrote up a post of mobile games reminiscent of Diablo in some form or fashion. While the games I chose are all fun in their own right and share characteristics with Blizzard’s hall-of-fame RPG series, none quite matched the exciting combat pacing of Diablo III on a PC. Turns out I was just thirteen months early. Barbearian is a real-time game that features frenetic combat full of huge hits against vast hordes of enemies. The constant motion, explosive hits, and overwhelming odds of it reminds me of running around Diablo III maps looking for more to kill. 

In Barbearian you are a bear-clad barbarian. Thus, you know, the puntastic title of the game. You didn’t start out that way, the barbarian part anyway. Abducted and brought to a strange world, you were forced to battle for your life and berserker-mode is just how you roll. The game isn’t just a quest for a survival, but one to unwrap the mysteries of a group of weirdos known as the Arbitrators and to find the way back home.

Any hope of a return home lay through the challenges arrayed before you. The game consists of a series of portal-connected worlds. Most portals lead to worlds full of people, creatures, and things dedicated to your death. Your job is to smash your way through these haters and take out all of the bosses on each of the three levels, thus defeating the world. Once you take out all of the bosses on one level a portal opens and will, ready or not, eventually suck you through to the next level. As you destroy foes, trees, walls, and really anything food and gems will drop which are the currency of the game. There are buildings back in non-combat worlds where you can buy access to special weapons which will then drop as loot in game.

Each level also has a peasant and fellow abductee that you can rescue. Those you rescue become part of your warband and you can buy them a kit to be knights or archers and they can be brought into battle to help with the carnage. They die easily, but luckily you can also buy revival magic to bring them back from the dead. You recharge these revivals by destroying enemy critters, which you were going to do anyway, and it’s easy to respawn a good portion of your warband over and over while in the enemy world.

Combat is the biggest part of the game, and it is fast, fun, and fierce. You start out with an axe attack and a charge attack the recharges after a few seconds. You’ll quickly find yourself looking for the biggest bang for your charge and slamming into dozens if not hundreds of foes, sending them flying lifelessly in all directions. Once you purchase the new weapons—machine guns, boom sticks, and many more—you’ll start finding them as you fight as well. In addition to these there are special temporary power ups that do things like make you invincible, faster, or give you a temporary ball-and-chain-type thing that swirls around you mowing down anything around you.

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Not only is combat great but Barbearian‘s levels are hand-crafted, attractive, and fully destructible. You can run around and bash down every tree and Kool-Aid Man your way through fences and walls if you want (and I want) and doing so yields extra fruit for your trouble. There’s a lot of great attention-to-detail aspects of the game that go a long way toward enhancing the feel of the game as well. Charging into a huge pile of enemies and sending their corpses scattering in every direction is a visceral delight and the kick-back from the machine gun that proves, even in a video game, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction are two of my favorite examples.

Barbearian is a challenging game, most people should expect to need a couple to a few tries on each portal, but it is far more forgiving than a lot of real-time games. You don’t need crazy-fast reflexes to beat a level or some precise order of moves and attacks to beat bosses. You will need to get good at wheeling around avoiding the masses arrayed against you, firing off various weapons as you go, and charging through tightly gathered mobs when the time is right. Certainly, anybody with experience kiting in other real-time games will feel right at home.

The biggest challenge factor in the game is health attrition. Your mighty bear has only one way to regain health: one shrine placed on each level where you pay to get back to full health. This creates some tense levels where you’re at a sliver of health and really need to get to the next shrine, which may be on the next level! The single chance to heal per level works well with the portals that open when you’ve killed the last boss, because you’re going through that thing whether you’ve healed or found the abductee on that level. You can run for it, and charging helps, but you feel the pull of the portal like a dog straining at the leash. It’s a cool effect and adds an interesting timing challenge to the game. Do you take a sub-optimal heal when you’re at half health or do you bet you can get back to the shrine without killing the last boss?

What if the game feels too difficult, or too easy for that matter? Barbearian has you covered in the form of three difficulty sliders. You can adjust the game speed, damage taken, and loot value both up and down. Using those sliders, you can micromanage the difficulty of the game and tune it to where it’s the most fun for you. I really love when games give that level of control to the player over their own experience.

Another very cool option in the game is the ability to customize its controls. There are default layouts for both small and large screens as well as a fully customizable layout where you decide exactly where all the buttons go. It’s a very smart plan that accounts for different screen sizes, hand sizes, ways people hold or prop up their devices, and even gaming posture. Oh, it also features controller support for you mobile-game-controller enthusiasts. Display wise, I think Barbearian is perfect for an iPad. It plays well on my iPhone 6S Plus, but I definitely prefer the bigger screen as it’s much easier to destroy all the things without your fingers getting in the way. 

If you’re a fan of real-time combat games Barbearian is easy to recommend as it is certainly one of the better mobile titles in the genre. It looks great, is loaded with smashy goodness and visceral feel, and is a ton of fun to play. It offers plenty of challenge without nearing the rage-quit-and-never-look-at-the-game-again reaction some similar games seem to elicit. The ability to micromanage the difficulty and completely control the UI layout is just icing on the cake.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! Feral Interactive have just announced that the release date for the iPhone port of Rome: Total War.

The iOS specialist developer originally brought us Rome: Total War on iPad in November 2016, and then preceded to port both the Barbarian Invasion and Alexander expansions as separate apps in 2017. We first heard about the iPhone version of Rome: Total War back in October last year, but the iPhone version will finally be releasing ten months later on August 23rd, 2018. That’s next week!

This is not a separate app – Rome: Total War is now essentially going ‘universal’ on iOS, so you’ll be able to play the same saves on both devices, and if you already own the game you’ll be able to install the iPhone version for free. Here’s a new trailer showcasing the iPhone UI to get you excited:

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Remember, you will need an  iPhone 5S or later, iOS 11, and 4GB of free space to install the game on your iPhone. We reported on the full list of requirements and compatible devices at the start of the month.

Rome: Total War is currently available on iPad for $9.99/£9.99/€10.99.