Championship Manager PSP review

Championship Manager is in many ways the most impressive game I’ve played on Sony’s PSP. Sure, the graphics are as beautiful as a letter from the tax authorities and the action is as fast as a valium-addicted land tortoise. But what matters here is that the coders at Gusto Games have managed to take an entire Championship Manager game and cram all the incredible depth into the handheld console. Well, maybe apart from a few details here and there. We’ll get to that later.

In short Championship Manager PSP allows you to take your beloved game with you and take your team through that vital Arsenal match anywhere and anytime you want. Between you and me – it’s perfect for sneaking into the office bathroom for a five-minute gaming break, too.

Everyone is a coach

Championship Manager PSP is a true port of the PC game, this means that you get exactly the gameplay you’re used to. This is not a shallow quasi-manager, it’s the full-blown thing. Thus you get to start your (hopefully) successful career as a manager of a football team, and you can choose between everything from an unknown 4th league team to Chelsea or Barcelona. Well, that’s unless you want to try the Challenge Mode that require you to achieve a particular goal with a particular team such as avoiding relegation. But I doubt that fans of the franchise will use much time on this gametype. They'll probably want the real deal.

And real deal they shall get. The depth of decisions that you need to make is by no means inferior to the PC version. You can mess with everything even down to individual player tactics and set up your precise tactic on the formation screen with feeds and runs. Thanks to the extremely sharp PSP screen the amount of text never really seems to be an issue. I’m sure fans of the Championship/Football Manager series will be delighted that not only are the managing options in-between really close to the PC version, the matches themselves also go across extremely well. You can pause at any time and change your tactics based on players’ condition, morale, rating and so forth. The 2D pitch is also included and comes with a player cam that fixes the screen to a particular player.

No mouse no cry

But how can this be, you might wonder, when the PSP has no mouse? Well, Gusto Games has used all the PSP buttons and turned them into handy shortcuts giving you precise and fast control. While there are some screens that can be a bit sluggish to setup (for example filters in the player search area) most are well designed and won’t bother you in the least once you get to grips with all the shortcuts. In fact, the way the controls have been handled and adapted to this highly unusual game for a console is clearly a highlight that sets new standards and hopefully inspires other developers.

Of course you might worry about loading times, too, after having suffered games like Burnout, but fear not. Again Gusto Games impresses with a game that never forces you to wait, the few loading sequences hardly ever take longer than 2-3 seconds. The only noticeable longer loading time is when the game prepares for a save. But even that one is easily bearable and of course only happens when you request it.

I’ve already mentioned some of the new features in the PSP version, but there’s a particular feature we mustn’t forget to mention: quick results. If you are really impatient and hate having to waste your time on unimportant games, you can now opt to select a quick result instead of going to the match. Personally, I think it takes a lot away the game’s charm away, but I reckon it can be handy at times. When managing West Ham I skipped the matches against Chelsea figuring my team would never be able to do well anyway, but behold – the quick match ended 1-1, so you don’t necessarily do worse when letting the PSP crack the whip on the back of your boys.

One good thing about skipping the games is that your don’t have to read the commentary text, which at some points is totally misleading and makes it virtually impossible to predict a goal. They seem to happen out of nowhere, because the commentary didn’t lead up to them properly.

Don’t stray from the true path

However, after praising the game in general as well as enjoying the new features, it's now time to talk about the aforementioned missing details. The PSP’s database gives you 55 leagues in 12 countries with 25.000 players. While sounding impressive on paper the reality is not as rosy. If you happen to choose a league outside the major football nations like England and Spain, you’ll notice big gaps. For example the Danish premier league only consisted of 8 teams, not 12. Some leagues might actually only consist of a single team (it looks that way when you search for players anyway, I haven’t tried all leagues myself, to be fair). I don’t think the UMD disc is the problem here, seeing it has a capacity of over 1GB, so it’s either a matter of not having enough data/licenses or the developer making shortcut. I do hope that the next version is going to offer more quantity-wise.

Some readers might wrinkle their nose at the missing multiplayer aspect, too, seeing that is one of the PSP’s main technical spearheads but to be fair I can’t see how that could have been done in a meaningful way. The nature of the PSP (short burst of gameplay on-the-go) and the nature of the Championship Manager games (long stretches of gameplay, dozens of decisions before each match) seem to rule out multiplayer. But maybe Gusto Games (or Sports Interactive for that matter) can turn something good up over time.

Thou shalt not hear music

Championship Manager's presentation only disappoints in one department: the music. I haven’t heard music this bad since the age of the C64 - it sounds like a school kid’s first try in MIDI. Never has the mute button felt so convenient. Of course the game itself doesn’t suffer at all from the absence of sound. But why bother at all when you can't do better?

Introducing Championship Manager to my PSP has really turned the console into a one-game console, simply because the gameplay is as addictive as always. Minor problems such as the small database and the at-times weird commentary rob the game of the chance to get a higher score, but having said that it’s still great fun and will provide you a time-killer that has no parallel on the PSP.

The big question is of course whether this fun period only lasts till Sports Interactive launches Football Manager 2006 on the PSP in a few months. While Gusto Games did a great job, they certainly didn’t rethink much of the core game or added features that appeal specifically to the hardcore community. Sports Interactive may be able to create an even better game with a bigger database and more innovation. However, SI did at some point warn the fans that FM PSP would not be the same as the PC game. But until we’ve seen both games in action lets just rejoice at the fact that we now have two skilled developers creating football management games for the PSP. And competition has always been a strong motivation for creating good products.