Championship Manager 2010

Most people seem to love it or hate it. I could almost love it, but not quite.

Flaws:
1. It crashes to desktop too often.
2. I can't understand the training schedules.
3. The menu where you perform most actions is very clumsy, too small and not at all ergonomic.
4. 3D match engines - well, they're never any good are they? In this one, too many frustrating things happen, like players running away from the ball or dribbling it out into touch when under no pressure.
5. During a match, the 3D engine takes up the whole screen so you can't see the commentary or important messages from your assistant.
6. As far as I can see, you can't offer players to other teams unless they're already interested.
7. I invested in scouting many other countries, and the scout reports became too much like hard work. I would have liked to be able to say - don't tell me about the same player more than once. Don't tell me about players over 30. Etc etc - filters to cut… more »

Most people seem to love it or hate it. I could almost love it, but not quite.

Flaws:
1. It crashes to desktop too often.
2. I can't understand the training schedules.
3. The menu where you perform most actions is very clumsy, too small and not at all ergonomic.
4. 3D match engines - well, they're never any good are they? In this one, too many frustrating things happen, like players running away from the ball or dribbling it out into touch when under no pressure.
5. During a match, the 3D engine takes up the whole screen so you can't see the commentary or important messages from your assistant.
6. As far as I can see, you can't offer players to other teams unless they're already interested.
7. I invested in scouting many other countries, and the scout reports became too much like hard work. I would have liked to be able to say - don't tell me about the same player more than once. Don't tell me about players over 30. Etc etc - filters to cut down the amount of messages in my inbox.
8. Physio report bug - No matter how many times I request a physio report on a player, I never get one.
9. It's not easy enough to get players to switch positions.

Good points.
1. You can run it windowed.
2. Wasn't too slow even on my laptop. Admittedly it's a core2duo laptop with 4 gig of ram, but even so it's a laptop.
3. Addictive.

If they cured all the faults it would be a great game. Even if they just cured the crashing it would be good. If you do buy it, remember to save game often. I can't help thinking that if this game had been a labour of love, it would not have taken much extra effort to make it really shine. For whatever reason, they've left it full of bugs with a lame front end.