Esports Manager 2026 is a pretty decent management game compare to other Esports themed games, although there are space for improvement.
In my opinion the game has a pretty good baseline.
There are basically two parts to play in this game: one is the team management aspect, where you can get players to your team, organize training and your team staff, doing business proposals with sponsors or with other teams and players, manage your equipment for your team, make strategies for your teams to follow in their matches, join up tournaments and also handle situations like players burning out, tension in the team and so on. You can actually manage real CS2 teams and players, most of them are added to the game in general, but you can update the game's database to add any additional players or teams aswell. Although there are a few teams and players who are not licensed, but they have been altered and added to the game. Also, the game adds generated teams and players to the player, so you are not just limited to real life organizations or teams, in fact you can make your own team and add a logo and even add custom players. Also, for the team building there are stats which effects the team performances like language cohesion or morale, and also roles for the players which are important when you build the team and the game does track these somewhat okay.
The other part is managing the matches, as you can decide what strategies your teams can do each round, what buy preset they should follow and based on your team's skill and their training they will try to perform them in the rounds. Of course you can also simulate matches if you have no intentions to sit BO1, BO3 or BO5 matches, but still I think these gameplay ideas sounds good in theory.
I want to add the strategy editor here, which you can use outside of the matches. You can basically set the preset strats for the matches or make your own overall pretty okay for your liking, although it can take a lot of time to build strats for every map, side and occasion, but it does help you on the long run and advised to do setup some of these.
Visuals are alright for a management game, for the map visuals they try to represent the real maps from CS2 as best they can, which is actually done decently.
There are not many music in the game and you mostly only notice them in the matches, but those are good addition for the match management parts.
Controls are also easy, you only have to use the mouse as everything you need is accessible in the UI in the correct menus.
These all sounds pretty good in theory, but Esports Manager 2026 has room for improvement.
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[*]One of the few complaints I have against this game, is some of the chance calculation. For example, as I wrote you can simulate matches if you don't want to play them, but I found this option annoying, because even though you have a well performing team with decent players, you still have close to 50-50 chance to lose to a low ranked team, so it's never safe to simulate matches. I understand that upsets can happen in CS2, but don't tell me that a top 10 can still have only around 50 - 60 % chance to beat a team which is outside of the top 100... also I do understand a lot depends on the players performance and the ranking, but ranking mostly represent the other, so it's just not making sense why I lose many matches with simulation, and you can't really "skip" matches like this.
[*]Then the other complaint is coming from this issue. Because simulating matches are out of question, I have to play these matches and manage them. Overall there is nothing wrong about that, except that it gets really boring after awhile. Even with max speed (4x), matches can take a lot of time, especially if you play BO5.
[*]Also for whatever reason aggressive strategies are more effective then any other type of strats in this game. Of course this is depended on your players and the enemy team and sometimes you actually have to switch this up because of the enemy, but overall aggressive strats are just works in most cases. Also also, I believe that every map is T sided in this game, it just seem that I can get more rounds on the T side which is just weird to see on Overpass or at Nuke, it's not quite accurate.
[*]Then there is some of the player and staff stats which needs some more work, because as of now to me it seems it's not worth to train players for a period time, it's more beneficial to buy a more skilled person from the market. Not to mention that to me some stats seems useless to have, this is especially true for the staff member stats, which as of now cannot be trained (or atleast it doesn't seem like it to me).
[*]Then there is the team equipment, which feels expensive to get although it seems to give high rewards. I think this part needs some balancing, because getting better gear is mostly limited to the team's accommodation, and if you can't afford a better place, then you are unavailable to buy better equipment from the shop (although there are sponsor rewards which can give you equipment, but still this system is pretty weird to me).
[*]I would also appreciate to see more more random events and interaction between you and your team members, as of now there are not too many and also it seems that you can keep telling them to wait with their request and they won't mind that, instead of reject them for example.
[*]Also additionally more events, tournaments with changing format by each year, not just the same formats every time.
[*]Finally it would be better to have more commentator voice lines, which are more meaningful in the matches aswell. Although I understand there are limited resources for this, but it can be boring to hear the same voice lines everytime. However, want to add that Esports Manager 2026 does add a lot of commentators to the game, even in different languages.
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I detailed this review more than it was needed probably, but the bottom line is that Esports Manager 2026 has a very solid base gameplay and good ideas with decent implementations, but there are some annoying aspects, missing features along the way. For those who are interested in Esports themed management games, especially in CS2 I think this is so far the best one to play on Steam and even for management enthusiast (especially for those who are in to Football Manager in general) can enjoy this game. I can recommended if you are interested in the genre and topic, although try to get it for half of the original price.
