Pro Cycling Manager 2007

There's something tragic about the man who spends his life in sport but never plays it: like the PE teacher who screams at frozen boys on Saturday mornings; the coach who makes diagrams for his athletes and gives them energy drinks as they trot onto the pitch; and the cycle team manager who whispers strategies to his team but never gets to steer a bike.

The fact is, Pro Cycling Manager 2007 won't appeal to everybody. There's bound to be a very limited audience for a game about instructing cyclists when to pedal fast, when to pedal slightly less fast, and when to have a drink of water, but we're determined to ensure that everybody looking to buy Pro Cycling Manager knows what to expect. This review is for all five of you.

Let's start with first impressions. After you've excitedly fumbled the cellophane from Pro Cycling Manager and booted it up, the first thing you're likely to do is go straight for one of the more accessible game modes to get an idea of what you're in for.

Of the four modes on offer, only Season entails heavyweight management. Of the other three – Stage Race, Stage, and Classic – Stage Race begins closest to a conventional racer.

After choosing from a selection of 20 official teams and a squad of five riders from a choice of ten, you get a brief spell with direct control of your riders, pumping Circle to accelerate and steering with the D-pad to get each of them around a drab qualifying lap, judging corners and balancing pace against your limited reserve of stamina.

Aside from sprint phases during races, this is the only opportunity you get to ride. However, even the manual activities in Pro Cycling Manager are dour and functional, and you're unlikely to lament the paucity of them. If anything, steering becomes a chore the moment you've acclimatised to the gentle rhythm of the races.

Once you set off on the race proper, what you get is ostensibly very similar to what you find in Stage and Classic modes, and while there are differences – more or less significant depending on your expertise and interest – we won't go into the minutiae here.

You take in the action from a camera hovering above and behind the slowly dissipating herd of cyclists. With L and R shoulder buttons you can skip from rider to rider, and with the other buttons you can either give tactical instructions or view information. For instance, X directs your riders to engage in a relay strategy, while Triangle brings up information about the selected rider's age, stamina, speed, and so on.

In-game, a series of tabs runs up the left-hand side of the screen showing each rider's Stamina and Resistance, with green and red bars respectively. Stamina steadily depletes throughout the race, while Resistance only depletes during moments of frantic activity, and refills at normal speed.

The aim of each race is essentially to manage your riders' stamina in such a way that they have the juice to come in first by deploying attacks and relays at the right time, and knowing when to instruct your racers simply to maintain their positions.

It can take half an hour to win a race in this fashion, and while it's possible to speed up the action, it's still a slog. In Season mode, you can choose to simulate races rather than attend and shepherd your riders through it, but the game clearly disapproves of the negligence this displays, sulkily warning you that the result will not be saved in your best scores or count towards unlocking bonus teams.

While you're undoubtedly encouraged to spend time on the tarmac, the backstage string-pulling of Season mode constitutes the real meat of the game. Although it falls far short of Football Manager's comprehensive majesty, the management side of Pro Cycling Manager is accessible and well-balanced.

Having chosen your team to begin with, you can choose what training programme each member is engaged in from a selection of Stage Race, Classics, and Sprints, and also the intensity of their engagement. Through the Fitness menu, you then take a look at bar charts showing how each regime will affect each rider's performance over the course of the season, enabling you to keep the team's momentum up for the duration.

The Contracts menu, meanwhile, enables you to manage your budget, offering lower or higher contracts to the relevant riders. And there's a pool of contractless youth riders to draw from when you're looking to get fresh blood, too.

The interface is bold and colourful, and uncluttered for the simple reason that there isn't much to fill it. The management is balanced and easy to get to grips with, but it doesn't rival Football Manager or even FIFA 08's management mode for depth.

Reviewing games fairly is more difficult than it looks, and reviewing niche games without dissent is nigh on impossible. On a popular review site, the PC version of Pro Cycling Manager is recorded as having received 3.4 out of 10 from the critics, but gets an average user score of 8.3 out of 10 from the various readers who've played it. Not just one or two users, either, but 79.

And therein lies the lesson. We're not going to give this game a very high score, because we find it dull and shallow. However, if you're a fan of cycling and management, feel free, just this once – and absolutely never again – to ignore what we say.