Football Management, FIFA Style

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Making the best use of Electronic Arts' massive worldwide deal with clubs, leagues and player names, FIFA Manager 10 includes official photos of 1000s of professional players, stadia and club badges, as well as boasting the most comprehensive football management sim yet.

FIFA Manager 10 is designed for control freaks. This game lets you take control of negotiations for pitch-side advertising and the contents of your club shop on top of the usual contracts, tactics and training element of soccer management sims.

There's even the personal touch – FIFA Manager 10 gives you the chance to not only create a manager profile but also a family and social life!

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Big buttons, clear text and player photos enhance the realism, while clear menus and icons complete a polished visual experience.

Unlike most football games, sound plays a major part, and not just within the match engine – a selection of tunes plays throughout the game, with an interesting selection of instrumentals that includes U2 and the old BBC Grandstand theme tune!

It takes almost 2 hours of game play to get to your first friendly – give or take 20 minutes depending on your system spec. This is pretty disappointing.

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The fact is, there are endless screens and tasks, some football related and others not quite so relevant. In fact it is easy to forget you're even playing a football game at times. Perhaps it is a common trend with games from EA that you can now choose a spouse, purchase a range of property, cars, other luxury items and even stocks and shares. However, FIFA Manager 10 is thankfully not The Sims.

FIFA Manager 10 does however have an impressive 3D match engine which is superior in every way to the ones used in Football Manager 2010 and Championship Manager 2010. While the matches can be played in text only mode, this isn't advisable for the simple fact that FIFA Manager 10 has a 3D match engine that resembles a demo game in the FIFA arcade football game. Missing this would be criminal.

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While there are no individual orders available before the game (and few within), no pre-match or half-time orders or pep-talks and quite a basic approach to tactics compared with competitor titles, FIFA Manager 10 makes up for this with great graphics, realistic movement and the use of minor real-time tactical adjustments, tactics and touchline shouts.

FIFA Manager 10 features a surprisingly low minimum system specification, especially considering the much high requirements of the FIFA 10 arcade soccer game.

In fact you could even run FIFA Manager 10 on a Pentium III processor - as long as your CPU is 1.3 GHz or more, on a system equipped with 1GB of RAM, at least 64 MB (AGP/PCI-E) video card, 1.2GB freehard disk space, an 8x DVD-ROM drive and a DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card, then your PC should be ready to run the game.

Installation uses the unpopular EA DRM management software to regularly check your copy is geniune (requiring you to be connected to the Internet whenever you wish to play), however there is a high chance that you will need to manually patch the game before running it. Two patches have been issued since the game was released in October 2009 - the most recent is available from games.softpedia.com.