Football Manager 2007

Now, at the risk of repeating and tediously recycling the exhaustive and exhaustingly detailed feature list that the parent version brought in this year, may we suggest you revisit October's in-depth review? We scored it a highly respectable 9/10, noting that it was "by far the most refined, in-depth and yet approachable version Sports Interactive has come up with to date", to which we should have added that no one else has even managed to get close to competing with what it offers. Happily, the Xbox 360 version is an utterly feature-complete no-compromise edition which brings the realism and obsessive attention to detail like no other console football management game has ever dared to - which is either a good thing or just plain terrifying, depending on how you want to look at it, and what sort of football management title you're looking for.

For those who just want the edited match highlights of what's new this year, it basically boils down to adding realistic player interactions, introducing a feeder club system, enhancing the role of team-talks, more interference from the board, a much-improved and easier to understand scouting system, deeper involvement with the youth set-up and a gazillion other minor tweaks and changes that all do their bit to contribute to a more involved and involving experience that gets ever closer to nailing what it means to be a modern day football manager. That was a long sentence, admittedly, but if you're interested in Football Manager, be prepared to be in it for the long haul.

The player interactions, in particular, make a huge difference to your role as a coach. Like any manager these days, player power is hugely significant to your ability to do the job, so if you're unwise enough to sign a trouble maker and don't bother listening to the advice of your team, you could quite conceivably have a revolt on your hands - or at the very least an unsettled squad.

But FM is - to a large degree - whatever you want it to be. It doesn't really punish players for not wanting to engage with the layers of micromanagement - the training, the scouting, the contracts. You can still play it just as a tactician and simply pick the team, choose the tactics, buy the players and get on with it, or - if you want - can assign all manner of stuff to your backroom team and keep clicking to the match day to enjoy the tension of seeing them out there on the pitch. To a large degree you go as deep as you want with FM, though it does make you feel slightly guilty whenever you ignore the depth it offers. Maybe that's just me.

But most of you will know all of this stuff anyway, so there's no need to regurgitate it. What's important in the context of this review is how well the entire game works on the 360, and whether SI has sussed out how to best make use of the 360 pad. It goes without saying that Microsoft could fix all of this in an instant by bloody well giving us the choice of using a mouse, but until that day, SI has come up with as-near-as-dammit the Next Best Thing. The key difference is the role that the right and left bumpers play this time - allowing you to quickly and easily switch between tabs, the menu system is about ten times easier to get your head around than it was last time when it relied on the user memorising which button to press on which screen. Also, the obvious use of 'B' as the 'back' button has been introduced, making it a very simple and consistent interface that even arch novices should slip into within minutes. Almost everything not immediately present on the screen you're on at the time is available by pressing the left or right trigger. Effectively, the main menu bar on the PC/Mac original can be brought up at any time with the left trigger, while right trigger brings up an Actions menu, containing a host of relevant options that make it a breeze to navigate through the game.

Some of the flaws and irritations aren't necessarily with the control system itself, but legacies of the parent version. For example, you still seem to lose half your backroom staff for no apparent reason at the start of the game (and seem powerless to do anything to stop everyone poaching them), you still have to wade through an enormous amount of emails every single week (and can't reduce the amount of communication thrown at you). And one startlingly obvious issue still occurs in the 360 version where the substitution screen during the match lists your squad, their number, their position but not their current fitness condition by default - which is, after all, one of the most pertinent pieces of information you require when deciding who needs to be taken off the field. Also, it's still a bit of a faff to have to fiddle around with the screen layout on the match screen to come up with a simple configuration that shows a) your squad status (i.e. Fitness and rating), b) the match highlights c) the match stats all at once. For reasons that elude me, you always seem to be missing one of those crucial bits of information no matter what combination you use, meaning that the player is forced to chop and change between views to keep up. While I'm a big fan of being able to tailor the viewpoint, it's always been a bone of contention that there's never been one standard default view that covers the essential basics. Rant over - it's no biggie, but sometimes the little things can prove annoying when you're spending hour upon end with the game - especially when you're talking about a version of the game where switching panes isn't as quick and simple to achieve. Next time out, FM's console approach would benefit from making sure more essential info appears on the same page - especially for people with high def TVs (this is the case already, but could definitely be improved). The amount of space wasted on widescreen displays, in particular, is something that could be addressed - frankly, the less navigation you have to do, the better.

A couple of other new additions make it into the 360 for the 2007 version with varying degrees of importance. First up is the slightly throwaway ability to put your own mugshot in the game via the Live Vision camera - it's a nice idea in theory in that it means your profile includes your picture, but the result is reduced in size to such an extent that it's barely recognisable. Elsewhere, SI has overhauled its Xbox Live mode this time to include Fantasy Draft - a custom competition where you can play each other in a series of rounds in 'snaking' order to ensure you play each other in reverse order in subsequent rounds. You can import your offline team, crucially, so this will definitely be a mode that experienced campaigners will want to dabble in with fellow managers once they've got a few seasons under their belt to settle those arguments about who the best manager is. As with the previous Xbox 360 version, 50 achievements are up for grabs in the game, and - once again, there are no easy points to be had. Expect many seasons of play to mine this one for points!