Ahh, August. A time for paddling pools, barbeques, and the return of the football season.
With football finally back, so is Championship Manager - and after the initial honeymoon period (sort of) last week, the rot has already set in.
Pressure is mounting on the manager, the media are having a field day, and chants of "You're getting deleted in the morning!" are emerging from the terraces - because this is certainly not the beautiful game.
War chestChampionship Manager 17 is structured much like any other football management sim: you pick the team, control tactics, sign players, and maybe do a little training regime tinkering too.
But while local rival Football Manager is premium, ChampMan has turned to free to play - and it shows.
You can spend the three(!) currencies on training, facility upgrades, scouting new players - and pretty much everything else.
This would be fine, if you could choose to ignore it. But you're constantly pressured into spending footbux, to the point where it feels a requirement.
While the three currencies do accrue automatically, the fact there's no organic way of improving your players or, well, doing anything without spending makes it seem more like online shopping than a football sim.
You just pick the things you want, hand over the money, and voila, your players are magically 50% better now.
It's a game of tic tacsThe overbearing free to play model minimises any strategy to the matches, too (why would there be any deep way of changing a match in your favour when you could just pay to make your players better?), leading to perhaps the most hollow sense of victory I've experienced in a football game.
When you score in Football Manager, you feel like you orchestrated it - and you deserve it. When you win in ChampMan you feel like you cheated, or you won just because your players happen to be higher rated than the opponents' - it's tedious.
While Championship Manager 17 is, to an extent, slick, its tactics are as deep as my paddling pool - and it's a hell of a lot drier, too.