EA Sports with a saddening effort to keep up with the very popular Championship Manager and Football Manager. That's the conclusion I've drawn after playing this game for little over 2 weeks.

Yep, they've tried it again. Although they knew Sports Interactive were working on their highly awaited Football Manager 2005 title, EA Sports have been working on a Football Manager too. I got it in the mail just a couple of days before the official release date and installed it. "Yeah, great!", I thought. And I was quite sure it was going to be better than the last version of the game. Excited about the great promised new abilities the game had, like the "Found a club mode" and, more important, Football Fusion. FIFA Football 2005 had been great, so this Football Fusion stuff should be even better. Well, that is what I thought.

So I started the game, chose my favourite team NEC Nijmegen to manage, skipped all the manager stuff, just signed some sponsors, selected 11 players to start the first following game and put a friendly match at the next day. When I clicked "play match", the first thing I saw was that there were alot of things to choose from, a TV show, which shows all goals in all matches of importance that day. It actually is a quite nice function, I can tell you, as you can coach your team in some kind of text mode and all special moments in the match (freekicks, corners, fouls and goals) are showed in a simulation based on the FIFA Football 2005 engine.
But who cares about all that when there's Football Fusion, I thought. So I clicked "Football Fusion", yeehaa. A window popped up and I thought it was, just like in the last version, to switch CD's. But as I have 2 CD drives, both the FIFA #2 disc and the FF #2 discs were in my drives, so I clicked "okay"... Then it happened, my game exited to my desktop. But it wasn't a crash, as I saw the credits and all passing down my window. Huh?

So I started it again, saw I didn't save my game and started a new one and when I got to the screen I mentioned just a few lines before, I decided to read it. It actually said I would have to load my Football Fusion game in FIFA Football 2005. Well, okay, besides the fact that it takes quite a few minutes to start both games again, I guess it was too much trouble to implement FIFA into TCM, so, fair enough, I started Football Fusion through FIFA.

In FIFA, I loaded my Football Fusion game and it started, I had to choose sides, so i chose my team and started playing. I immediatly saw all of my players being bald. Well, okay, I can live with that, it can only get better after this. At least, that's what I thought. But EA Sports have some more surprises for me in prospect. My copyrighted, state of the art, killer formation, was converted in some absolutely-not-similar pre-designed FIFA formation. That was about the time I smashed my keyboard so hard on the ground I had to get some glue and fix it all back together. After loading my (4 - 0 won) game back into TCM, it became clear to me that with the bad match reports and all, this Football Fusion was actually worse than the last one.

No Football Fusion for me anymore, I decided. So I started playing it in highlight mode. It got better and I actually started to enjoy playing this game. At least, when you get to learn to play with the smelly interface and navigation. I planned a stadium expansion and my team got 3rd in the league. But more annoyances were to follow. Again, there was this bug, that some parts of the new stadium will never be finished, just as in TCM 2004. Argh, I thought. But not only that, in the next season, my club got into deep financial debt. I didn't buy any expensive players, nor did my stadium expansion cost too much, but EA Sports again didn't feel the Dutch league was any good, so they decided on an attendance multiplyer of 0.30 for the Dutch league.

It annoyed me and I actually had to accept an offer from another club in England to keep on playing. But all my fun was gone. I really did not enjoy playing this game anymore. But as Football Manager had not yet arrived, I played it for a few more days anyway..
It's not that I really do not enjoy playing this game, but it's bads are so bad, they blurred my view and I could really not focus on the goods anymore. It has them, though. The new player rating system is great, makes it more realistic, as it is much more detailed than it was last year. The found a club mode is nice for the ones willing to start at the bottom and maybe some day reach the top. The highlight mode is nicely done, although we already know the system from Championship Manager and Football Manager, it's nice to actually see the players move, head and score beautiful goals.

However, my opinion is quite clear, it's a copy from TCM 2004 with a new, uncomfortable interface and some extra functions and changes. But I would really rather have seen an exact copy with a new database and maybe the highlight mode and player rating system of the 2005 versio