Manager Pro Football: European Championship 2008

What do you call a sandwich without any slices of bread or filling in the middle? Or a cocktail, where both the fruit juice and alcohol are strangely absent? In all likelihood, if you were in a bar where you were expected to get drunk on nothing more than the air in the glass or you picked up a sandwich from your local supermarket that consisted of the plastic box and nothing more, chances are you'd ask for your money back.

The desire for remuneration plays its part in Manager Pro Football: European Championship 2008 too, as this is a game that has little business describing itself as a football management title, considering that there's very little to manage and the game's take on football is woefully inept. Though the developer has very smartly managed to link the title to this summer's European Championship in Austria and Switzerland without infringing anyone's copyrights, if Euro 2008 had actually played out like this, one suspects most folk would have packed up and gone home after the first 90 minutes.

Make no mistake, there's nothing wrong with Manager Pro Football's bite-sized approach to football management. Because Ojom has chosen to replicate Euro 2008 rather than a full league, the most number of games you can possibly play is six, meaning that even a successful campaign is over in a matter of minutes. So, you'd perhaps assume that there was some kind of training routine you can enter into pre-tournament to lengthen the challenge.

There isn't. In fact, the managerial options laid out on the table are relatively few. On offer are the chances to control your chosen team's tactics – formation, the way players move the ball, and whether you want them on the offensive or packing the defence out – and their training routine, which essentially revolves around assigning three different areas of play (corners, penalties, finishing and so on) that you'd like them to work on, presumably upping their performance in those areas when they take to the pitch.

Such options can, of course, be altered in between matches, but it's hard to fathom just whether their application makes any difference at all, given the hackneyed game that is portrayed on screen when you actually play a match. Following the fixture structure set out by Euro 2008 itself, the teams that take to Manager Pro Football's pitches are barely recognisable when compared to the real thing. Kits are a matter of pot luck rather than a connection with the actual teams – Germany playing in yellow and Spain in pink during my first couple of run throughs.

The football itself is tragic; the ball is played through a narrow path down the middle of the pitch, often only needing a tap from the midfield to send it sliding underneath the goalkeeper into the back of the net. Players repeatedly run backwards with possession, there's no attempt to mix play up by chucking in a cross every now and again, and free kicks are routinely taken from the wrong place – often the wrong half.

However, unlike some other management sims, Manager Pro Football does allow you to have some bearing on the decision making during the matches themselves. Should you win a free kick or corner, the game immediately tasks you with choosing the type of kick you'd like to pull off, whether it be a long corner, a cross or a direct attempt on goal. Everything is kept to a short and sharp script and any semblance of free play is thrown out of the window. Corners, whether short, medium or long, are always a case of crossing the ball to one of several free players in the middle of the box, one of whom takes a shot that – nine times out of ten – results in either a goal or another corner.

It's quite possible to get stuck in a loop of corners – something that is preferable in attack than it is defence, though in most matches there's a fair chance you'll have one half on the up and one under the cosh. Indeed, it's fairly unsatisfying to know that a two- or three-goal lead amounted in the first half will more often than not be eradicated in the second half. Likewise, it's not unusual to find yourself several goals behind in quick time, only to draw level in the second half.

The game's difficulty levels – which are prescribed team by team rather than generally, meaning taking on the management of Germany is always described as 'easy', while attempting to win with Switzerland is deemed terminally more difficult – seem to have little effect on the actual results; it's not uncommon to see Spain or Italy get thumped, while the likes of Austria and Romania often pull off what would be deemed as 'shock wins' in the real world.

All in all, this compendium of half-hearted measures and the game's disjointed approach to replicating matches themselves results in a title that feels like it neither offers the strings a manager needs to pull, nor the pitch on which to pull off such endeavours. This could and should be a comfortable first step for players who are put off by the stat-heavy approach of other management sims, but instead it's a quick cash-in that showcases a brand of sullen soccer rather than a fiesta of football.