Goal Football Manager

Football managers aren't exactly renowned for their expansive vocabularies.

Whether they're indulging in bizarre self help-speak like Brendan Rogers, mixing their metaphors Kevin Keegan-style, or spouting semi-coherent tripe in a Joe Kinnear fashion, looking for enlightenment in post-match interviews is often a fruitless task.

So the title of Goal Football Manager (aka Goal Soccer Manager, aka Goal 2014 - Football Manager), in all its nonsensical glory, seems strangely apt.

Sadly, that's one of the very few entertaining things about the game. Otherwise it's an extremely shallow, restrictive, clunky, and just plain boring social footy management game that's best left in the locker room.

The goal, as always, is you guide your team of no-hopers to league glory. Everything is fictionalised here, from the teams to the players and the competitions you find yourself entered into.

It's up to you to assemble your team, recruiting from the transfer market where necessary, and form them into some kind of shape for the next game. Those games happen at set times each day, which is as annoying as it sounds.

But it's the lack of stuff to do in between those games that really galls. Buying players is a simple case of selecting them in the transfer market section. If you've got the money, they're yours.

Selling your unwanted players is the same. The lack of any kind of bidding process makes it feel like you're buying a book from Amazon rather than the final integral piece of your tactical master plan.

Except, it's impossible to develop such a master plan in the first place. Players are separated into crude defence, midfield, and attacker categories. Forget the finer points of each position. In this game there's no distinction between a tricky number 10 and a bustling number 9 target man.

You can set each player's "aggresivity" (really) and offensive level, but that's it.

Matches themselves pass buy with nary a flicker of recognition, beyond a "Live Ticker" summary of chances, scorers, and those booked. It's utterly uninvolving, and results feel like a roll of the dice, with the team containing the better players generally favoured.

Elsewhere you can put your players on training regimes, which amounts to placing them in rough categories for shooting, marking, technique, and the like. The training itself happens at a set time each day, like the matches.

Otherwise, you can do things like expand your stadium, bring in new sponsors, and, er, check your line-up. Fatigue plays a part in the latter, as does whether to go with a player's potential versus their current ability.

But really, we can't see many people wanting to stick around for long enough to see their young talents blossom.

Football is brutal like that, and Goal Football Manager is undoubtedly set for the chop in the morning.