Football manager 2021 stadiums series#

On a more game-centric note, it would also have been a bit cheap for players to be doing well in the league only for multiple star players to suddenly come down with the virus. Essentially, he considers the game a release for people to help them escape reality, and it would be pretty hard for anyone who may have lost friends or family to the virus to then try to take their mind off things with some Football Manager only to find they had to deal with it there too. Sports Interactive head honcho Miles Jacobson has already explained why the game doesn’t include references to COVID and it would be difficult to argue with his logic. As such, Football Manager takes place in an alternate reality where the stadiums remain fully packed and teams aren't affected by sporadic outbreaks of COVID-19. Despite the game kicking off at the start of the 2020-21 season, there’s no reference whatsoever to the coronavirus pandemic that continues to plague the majority of the world. There’s one glaringly obvious ‘feature’ here that hasn’t been included in the game, but whether that’s a good or bad thing is purely down to personal taste.

The result is a game that still feels like it’s trying to jam a square peg (a complex football management sim) into a round hole (a games console), even though it’s clear the edges have been given the sandpaper treatment to try and make it fit better. You can also push in the left stick to bring up a mouse pointer, which works a little better but is also quite clunky and slow to move around. Using a controller exclusively, meanwhile, is an exercise in patience and memorisation as you try to learn all the different button combinations used to access different parts of the screen.

Playing with touch controls is relatively painless, although the sheer amount of detail on the screen means that sometimes it's hard to tap exactly what you're trying to hit, and you’ll still be pressing controller buttons on occasion to access certain menus.Ĭaptured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

While the overall sense is that the menus have been improved compared to the previous game, however, it’s safe to say the controls are still the most awkward aspect of playing Football Manager on the Switch.

Football manager 2021 stadiums series#

Some related screens are now displayed via a series of tabs along the top of the screen, which makes navigation a bit easier, and various other screens have been given a revamp to try and make things more intelligible. The general layout of the menu system has also been tweaked a bit as Sports Interactive continues to try to improve the user experience, which has always been quite clunky on the Switch. For example, if you won a match 1-0 but your xG was something like 3.4 (meaning you were expected to score at least three based on your performance), this suggests your players are having problems with the final ball that you’ll need to sort out. The xG stat is a useful way of telling whether all the hard work your players are putting in on the pitch is actually paying off with a score line that reflects.