The Dynamic Manager Timeline also adds extra flavour for the truly committed who want to see their managerial story stretched across years and years. The match engine is less predictable with quite the back and forth in highlights, and the animations themselves are improved, if still kind of rudimentary. However, the novelty does wear off pretty quickly - it’s neat, for sure, but not exactly worth your money on its own. This will definitely be a big deal for a lot of people, and it seems as if Sports Interactive are highlighting it as the most meaningful addition this year. The dedicated fans who wear a suit for in-game Champions League finals now have a whole other level of immersion for their lunacy, with the iconic theme blaring out before matches and the UI bearing official branding. However, the single most significant addition to Football Manager this year is official European competition licensing. Then there’s the Supporter Confidence System, a fun little insight into what fans think of your tenure that shows how dumb football fans can be as they often want you to play injured players. Elsewhere, scouting has been overhauled to allow you to be much more specific with your scouts, though I’ve found it to be quite clunky and a bit overly complicated so far. Probably the biggest new feature for FM 23 is the Squad Planner, which is basically a fleshed out version of the Squad Depth mechanic that lets you see depth in positions and how potential signings will compare. In fact, I had to double check the headline features to see what’s new this time out. It’s really hard to see much difference at all when you load up your save for the first time, and even after dozens of hours I can’t say there’s much here to excite. But it’s an iterative follow-up to Football Manager 2022 at best, itself extremely similar to Football Manager 2021. As a pound for pound investment, it’s hard to beat, especially if you haven’t picked up FM in a while. ![]() Make no mistake: FM 23 is still a fantastic sports sim that offers brilliant value, as it’ll likely soak up hundreds of hours of your time without the need to put down any extra money. It’s a difficult balancing act that that not everyone gets right, and it unfortunately feels like Sports Interactive hasn’t quite kept the scales level this year with Football Manager 2023. As soon as a new game is released, you need to move onto next year’s edition and try to innovate while also making sure the most current one remains relevant and interesting to its community across its life cycle. Developing annual sports games is hard, no matter what anyone says.
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