Mobile Club Manager
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| Mobile Club Manager

Football management is a tough old game, or so football managers would have you believe. While it's true that at the highest level they can find themselves out of a job after a couple of dodgy results, there aren't many other professions out there that reward you with a multi-million pound pay-off for failure.

It's quite logical, then, that quite a few of us fancy a crack at the post. Mobile Club Manager offers you the chance to manage a top European club of your choice, training your players and selecting the team for the next game.

Of course, there are other proven mobile footy management games on the market, such as Real Football: Manager Edition, which turned the beautiful game into a deep, involved strategy game. Mobile Club Manager, though, opts to take a much more casual approach, moulding the game to fit the strengths of the mobile platform.

Take the training options, for example. These take the form of a series of reaction-based mini-games. At the moment (we'll come to that later) you have only three areas in which you can strengthen your players: Ball Control, Strength and Shot Stopping.

Ball Control presents you with a side-on view of your £100,000-a-week prima donna, and proceeds to lob a series of footballs at foot, thigh and chest height. By pressing '2' or '5' for the higher balls you can bring the ball under control, then a press of '8' at the right time will volley it back from whence it came. Low throws can be returned instantly.

Strength is considerably tougher, requiring you to stop a fast-moving gauge in the sweet spot to enable your player to complete a bench press. Shot Stopping is harder still, tasking you with pressing the correct direction (out of eight) to pull off a string of penalty saves.

Once you've successfully completed a task, a degree of improvement is applied to the appropriate skill stat, whether you choose to train an individual or the whole team. Naturally, if you concentrate on individual players you'll receive a bigger improvement.

While it's a nice idea, we didn't feel that the games were quite polished enough to stand repeated play. Rough edges like the quality of the graphics and the difficulty in judging the ball's height in the Shot Stopping game tend to turn training into more of a chore than a pleasure after a while.

The tactical side is similarly thin. The developer encourages you to sign up to the Boardroom – the game's online community – to discuss tactics, but there really isn't much scope for Mourinho-like organization. You pick your formation from a list of six, then pick the players to fill it. That's it.

The games themselves are played in the virtual world in real-time on pre-arranged match days, with no active participation required from you. You'll receive updates via SMS, which can be customized to provide you with more or less information. It's an attempt to add a layer of interactivity, realism and involvement to proceedings, but the novelty soon wears off. Without much tactical involvement it doesn't tend to feel like your team, and having to wait until prearranged dates to play your games becomes a little irritating.

One neat feature that goes some way to adding a layer of involvement is that your results go toward a national online league table. Win with Manchester United and your result contributes to the fortunes of the team as a whole on the Mobile Club Manager website. This is a promising feature that could lure many people into the experience, but again, it needs some polish in terms of conveying and explaining the information to you. We didn't find it entirely clear exactly how or where we were contributing.

At this point we really should introduce the major caveat that, while not excusing any of these issues, could well see them corrected in time. Mobile Club Manager is currently at the Beta stage of development, which means that a number of potentially major features are yet to be implemented, such as transfers, one-on-one friendlies and financial tinkering. Whilst this may sound a little odd for a mobile game, this is pretty much par for the course for online experiences found on home computers. It allows developers to cater the experience to the audience according to their wants.

Because of this, Mobile Club Manager is a tough game to judge. It's a work in progress, and as such the mark given below could be irrelevant in just a few months' time. However, as it stands now, with the core structure in place, we don't feel it's entirely successful as a football management game.

As a unique football-themed community experience that fits around your life, however, it's well worth keeping an eye on. When it's finished, it could be beautiful game.

Mobile Club Manager

A work in progress which is sat in mid-table mediocrity at present, but it could be challenging in the top half of the table with a few quality signings
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.