Jackreyes' Gaming Blog

Football Director DS may well be one of the worst games I have ever played. It barely even warrants a review. It is clearly trying to bring the football management genre (of which I am a fan) to handheld consoles, in this case the DS. Sports Interactive and Eidos have done this somewhat succesfully with the PSP versions of the Football Manager series and Championship Manager series respectively. Whilst they are just watered down versions of the PC games they did still impress me. Football Director DS does not impress me in the slightest. At first I was pretty excited about the game being announced, after all, a portable football management game with touchscreen controls should be great, right? Seems this isnt the case, im not sure whether this is their fault or the DS’s.

The DS was never going to be able to handle a huge database of players and clubs, but it seems pretty halfhearted. You can only manage english teams – fair enough I suppose, but players from teams you may face in the Champions League or European Cup seem severely underrated. Does this make said teams easy to beat?.. No. the match engine seems to be mostly random and all down to luck. the best example was when i was managing Arsenal with no available keepers, about to play Chelsea. I  put Fabregas in goals for the game, I won 3-0. I can possibly see a 3-2 victory perhaps, but, not conceding a single goal? What is wrong with this game?? My list of complaints doesn’t end here, this is just my biggest complaint I suppose, the rest I can cope with. If you are already bored of reading this and well and truly put off buying the game, then I suggest you just scroll down to the final score.

Now for a more in-depth look at the game, I’ll start with the interface.

Nothing to do here…

As I said earlier, a football management game with touchsreen controls should be pretty great, but then.. that is if they aren’t hidden behind bizarre menu’s that don’t really seem to fit the requirements for… menus. Simply tap something on the touchscreen and you should see some information on the top screen. Hold down L and tap, and you’ll go into a page especially for that team/player. Seems simple enough, turns out to be fiddly and on the whole, not worthwhile, after all, you don’t really need to look at who you’re signing, the chances are they’ll deteriorate wildly in a few days at the club. Tactics seem pretty useless as well, nothing in-depth, nothing that seems like it would make any difference in a match.

Now back to the ‘database’. Quite simply, it just isn’t good. It could be worse, but not much worse. Some players have been transferred from their old clubs to new, some just haven’t. Shaun Wright-Phillips is a good example. He remains at Chelsea, when in fact he had moved back to Manchester City. The game has an editor, but it only allows you to change player and team names. There is a ’stat’ for each player type, Handling for Keepers, Tackling for Defenders and so on. Then Pace and Overall are supposedly distributed in the same way to all players. Some defenders look like they’re just as good at ‘Passing’ and ‘Shooting’. Its all rather mixed up and confused, and the rate at which players can deteriorate is ridiculous. The overall rating just skips around.

The match engine is just broken, and purely text based which also appears to be randomised.

Overall, this is the sort of game I’d expect to find for the PC years ago.. on floppy disk.

Maybe someone will make a decent football management game for the DS at some point, but until then, make sure you DON’T buy this awful product.

Ratings:

Graphics: 5/10 – Nothing special, no graphical match engine, but they’ll do..
Controls: 2/10 – Far too fiddly to work well, pity.
Sounds: 1/10 – Not mentioned in the article, not worth it really, just a few crowd cheers during games. Very poor.
Accuracy: 4/10 – Sure this rating only applies to certain types of games, but here, its probably the most important.

Overall: 2/10 – A huge letdown. Bring on Imagine: Packed lunch making, can’t be worse than this.
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~Jackreyes