14 DAY TRIAL // There are players who might see Football Manager 2014 as just another yearly installment that developer Sports Interactive has launched with a minimal set of improvements and with an update to the team roster in order to keep hardcore fans satisfied.
I have played hundreds of hours of this and last year’s titles and I could never go back willingly to FM 2013 because it seems like a very barren experience, focused on math more than on actual football and its capacity to surprise.
The new Sports Interactive title makes a big change when it comes to tactics, allowing gamers to use instructions rather than sliders in order to tell players what to do on the pitch, both from a team and from an individual perspective.
This makes the entire experience more organic and means that gamers will be more inclined to tweak their approach during each match, something that real-world coaches also do.
Football Manager 2014 also makes player morale more important to his performance, which means that each member of a squad needs to be constantly evaluated and a player needs to discover how he responds to praise and to criticism.
Sports Interactive has also improved the way matches are simulated, with more circumstances taken into account to establish the way the game flows and the final result.
The overall experience is more engrossing than ever, and the attention to details for each included team means that there’s an almost infinite potential for the game to surprise and delight players regardless of their choice of favorite club.
For those who do not appreciate the abstraction level of simulation experiences linked to the genre, another good runner-up for the Best Sport category is NBA 2K14, although the changes to the control scheme will frustrate many of the fans initially.