Football Manager 2020 Touch Review
This review was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.
Key Info
System: Switch
Developer: Sports Interactive
Publisher: SEGA
Release Date: 10 December 2019
Price: $39.99 / £29.99
Football Manager has long been a franchise that allows armchair pundits to truly put their money where their mouth is and step into the shoes of the most important role at their favourite club. FM20 Touch is the third entry in the series to grace the Switch. It brings some minor tweaks and changes, but is largely the same, incredibly in-depth experience we’ve had over the last two years. Although the menus can be obtuse and finicky to navigate at times, fans of the series - and management sims in general - will be right at home.
Player Manager
You’re presented with a frankly insane amount of clubs to choose between at the start of the game, across 116 leagues and 51 different countries. Suffice to say, you’ll struggle to find your favourite team to take charge of - if you want to take your local club from non-league obscurity to Champions League glory, you can do. Although weirdly, the Japanese leagues are absent, so there’ll be no commanding the Nintendo-sponsored J2-League outfit Kyoto Sanga unfortunately.
The depth you can go to in FM20 Touch is nothing short of staggering.
If, for some reason, you can’t find a club you like, you can create a custom one. You can choose the name of the club, design the home, away and third kits, and even style the club badge. You do need to choose an existing club as your starting point (which is then removed from your subsequent game), but other than that you’ve got full control. It’s quite a cool touch, and I enjoyed taking my very own club to league glory.
Once you’ve chosen (or created) your club, you’ll begin unravelling menu after menu in a bid to guide the team to success. It can be quite daunting at first if you’re not a seasoned Football Manager veteran, but the game does a reasonably good job of inducting you into the various areas you’ll need to take charge of.
Happily though, you’re often given the option to delegate everything from training to contract negotiation to your backroom staff. This is a good way to get to grips with the fundamentals of the game - namely tactics, team choice and so on - whilst allowing the game to automate things like training the youth team.
Children Are The Future
Not that you have to of course. Veteran players will still be able to tweak and change absolutely everything. The aforementioned youth players can be nurtured from the moment they arrive at your club as fresh faced (or silhouetted in lieu of a headshot) teenagers, right the way through to retirement as club legends - the expanded Development Center being one of the upgrades in this year’s version of the game.
Outside of the backroom efforts of course, the meat of the game lies in managing the team and the tactics. You can fine tune a whole host of formations, both conventional and otherwise, assign specific roles to certain players, tweak your defensive line, adopt different mindsets during different phases of play… you get the picture. The incredible depth on offer knows no bounds, the whole thing is seriously impressive.
The visuals of the non-menu portions of the game leave a lot to be desired.
Each of these gargantuan areas to explore are done so via the game’s many menus. This being the touch version of the game, you can naturally use the Switch’s touchscreen to select various options, action substitutions and so on. Unfortunately, with there being so much information on screen at any one time, these options don’t have the largest presence for you to jab your finger at. I often found myself clicking the wrong thing, or subbing in the wrong player due to a mispress. I don’t exactly have the fattest fingers in the world either.
While in docked mode you have the option of moving a cursor using the analogue stick, but it’s so painfully slow that you’ll likely revert to quick taps of the directional buttons to get to the relevant area. I ended up relying on this largely in handheld mode too. Touch may be in the title, but it’s just not the best way to navigate the game’s many, many menus.
Professional Foul
Unfortunately the game falls down on the presentation front too. Highlights during games are shown in real time, which is fun. It’s good to see your tactics pay off in a Match of the Day style clip. But visually, you’d be hard pressed to distinguish it from the N64’s World Cup 98. Creating the look of your manager at the beginning of your save is also incredibly limited and looks inexcusably rough. Whilst the bulk of the game does take place in the menus, it would’ve been nice for the non-menu part to have looked at least like it was from the HD generation.
There’s also a complete lack of sound or music whilst you’re tending to your club’s needs. This may be a blessing for some, who may have found a constant tune on a loop whilst fiddling with training setups irritating, but it does make the thing feel rather lifeless. You’re at least treated to some generic crowd sounds and the odd peep of the referee’s whistle during matches though.
Verdict
Football Manager 2020 Touch is not without it’s flaws. The non-menu portions of the game look incredibly ropey, and navigating the myriad of menus can be a bit finicky at times. But beneath those relatively superficial gripes is the managerial behemoth that has more than earned its stripes over the years. The level of detail you can drill down to is nothing short of miraculous, whilst the ability to palm stuff off to your backroom staff ensures that newbies (or long-term returning players) can get to grips with the game too. It’s not perfect, but Football Manager fans should be satisfied with what’s on offer.
Pros & Cons
+ Incredible level of depth and detail
+ Hundreds of clubs to choose from
+ Does a decent job of initiating newer players
- Touch controls aren’t the most precise
- Some visuals leave a lot to be desired