TL;dr – this is an excellent game of purely abstract player development, but an absolutely awful game of turn-based football.
Elaboration to the full extent of the character limit below…
For years, I thought I had a love-hate relationship with this game. I finally realized I don't love the game sometimes and hate the game sometimes. I love the management part and hate the actual on-field matches. On the positive side, I can't say enough about how good the player development is. It's so exciting to take a team of amateurs and develop them over the course of years into veterans who have all the tools necessary to win a game against any opponent. There’s a lot of fun numbers-go-up things happening, interesting decisions about which direction to take your players, and exciting anticipation about how much better your team is gonna be once you’ve developed that next specialization or skill. And the fact that the actual matches are resolved with a turn-based tactical framework means that there’s complete clarity about what impact each skill or upgrade will actually affect, something that Football Manager can never say.
However, it’s kinda hard to stay excited about the player development, when the thing you’re developing them for (the actual football matches on the pitch) is very poorly designed. I’ve given feedback about some of the issues I’ve come across over the years, but the bottom line is that this game is full of “feels bad” mechanics. For example, there’s a warning confirmation window before you kick the ball out of bounds, but there isn’t one for passing to a forward who’s offside, even though there is no possible positive outcome or benefit to doing that? While the design of the management side generally feels quite clever and smart, bizarre design choices on the pitch make it a frustrating and unsatisfying experience of watching your superior tactics be foiled by bad luck in one game, then in another game, you might spend your last action of the half on a throwaway shot that you know won’t go in because it’s a midfielder shooting from long range with single-digit accuracy, but you score anyway. Sometimes even the wins don’t feel satisfying, because you know you just got lucky and didn’t have the better team or strategy. The game doesn’t give you enough ways to mitigate bad luck, and even the good strategies feel like you’re just exploiting dumb AI. For example, all you have to do to make crosses literally impossible is put defenders in every square of the penalty box, but the AI often won't do that even if you score with a cross multiple times. They usually don't change formation until you already have a runaway lead.
You might discount other negative reviews that talk about RNG because of how low their playing time is. Well, my playing time is way higher than theirs, and I fully, 100%, passionately agree with them. Don’t get me wrong, if you develop your team far enough, the RNG won’t matter. You can get some bad beats occasionally, and still win easily. But that’s the problem, it’s easy in a way that isn’t fun. You can do literally the same play over and over again, with the exact same results, with the opponent showing no ability to adapt to your strategy. You can repeat the same turn five times or more against weak enough opponents, doing the *exact* same actions. Usually the only reason it stops for me is because my DM starts to tire and then he gets injured when one of the opponent misses a tackle against him, because injuries *only* happen in this game as a result of missed tackles. But if he gets lucky and avoids injury or you have a spare with the same ability, you can keep on going all game long, doing the same thing and getting the same result. How is that a strategy game? When you have a better team, it becomes a puzzle game of figuring out the best way to get the ball across the field most efficiently in the shortest number of actions so you can score the highest number of goals. It doesn’t feel anything like real football.
If you have the right skills, you can do a turn where your keeper kicks the ball to a midfielder, who passes to a striker, who scores a goal. The ball can travel the entire length of the pitch in those three actions, without any other player on the field moving a step. Speaking of moving, it turns out running in place is a great way to earn specialization points for your players. If you have a novice goalkeeper, you want them to gain GK specialization points, because the GK specialization will give them +50% to their defense in net. If they block a shot, that’s 8 GK points, great. But that won’t happen very much when the keeper is green. If he misses the save, that’s only 3 GK points, and he gets nothing at all if the defenders block the shot instead. So you know what you do when you know you’re gonna lose a game and just want to get your keeper some experience? You spend all three of your actions having him simply move into other squares before returning to the goal. He gets 2 GK per move, for a total of 6 GK if you use your whole turn on that. Yes, the goalkeeper gets twice as much GK experience for jogging around the penalty area as he does trying to block a shot. You know, because nothing trains your hands better than moving your feet. Similarly, someone trying to get the Attacking Midfielder specialization gets experience from simply moving back and forth on that part of the field, but would get no experience for taking a shot on goal (“attacking”) if he started the turn too far forward.
The management and player development aspect of this game is so good, I realized that it’s what I’m subconsciously comparing to when I play games like Madden or NBA2K. That’s why it’s so tragic that the actual football matches on the pitch are so unrealistic and non-strategic. As someone who’s had a lifelong fascination with turn-based sports games, I am sincerely heartbroken that the devs are making a sequel that just adds some extra features to the part of the game that was already fun, but doesn’t do a damn thing about the massive flaws with the core gameplay. I was not invited to the beta test of FTG: World, but I’ve watched more than a season of gameplay videos from someone who was. FTGW would basically just be an overpriced DLC if it wasn’t for the graphical overhaul they recently announced. The faces needed improvement, true, but that wasn’t their biggest problem. The fundamental core of the gameplay is deeply flawed, in my passionate opinion.
I can’t speak for the many people who left good reviews here, but if I were to speculate, I’d say most of them probably don’t have as much interest in the tactical side as I do. A lot of them might be simming the matches and making the game a sort of beer-and-pretzels Football Manager, or they’re so impressed by the high quality of the management layer that they don’t think about how awfully designed the on-field layer is. To be more pointed, I think there are probably some players who benefit from the RNG, or just cheese the AI, and have convinced themselves that the cheese or luck is actually strategy. Sometimes, I think some of that type of person might be on the dev team.
The bottom line; if you’re here for the management and don’t care about how bad the resolution of actual football matches is, then I truly think you’re in for a rare treat with this game. But if you want a tactical experience like XCOM, where superior strategy and preparedness can mitigate bad luck or stronger enemies, then run away. Please don’t waste your money. Play the demo or wait for a free weekend, and then maybe buy it on sale of you must. But please don’t pay full price to devs who refuse to acknowledge the huge flaws in the gameplay. You’d be better off buying the XCOM boardgame (which is *literally* rolling dice and pressing your luck) than this frustrating RNG-fest, if you actually care about having a game with interesting tactical decisions.
