Having fond memories of the game Premier Manager 2 on my Atari ST many years ago, I thought I might had found the bargain of the century when I came across Premier Manager 2003-2004 for just a pound. I must admit that I like football management games a lot less than I used to, but still it should be fun for an hour or eighty, right?

Erm… wrong.

This game is very much one for football management purists. The graphics, such as they are, are extremely minimalist – though there are a few nice pictures of the staff member you’re talking to at the time etc. The interface itself looks okay until you go into the main options menu, which just looks hideous. (Sorry to whoever designed it, but that’s my opinion of it!) Match representation is extremely basic, with basically small counters moving around the pitch and a dot for the ball. You get all the normal features of a football management game – transfers, contract negotiations, begging the Chairman for more money, in-game tactical changes, scouting new players, developing the young talent, keeping track of injuries, etc. You also get to deal with the press and players’ agents. Compared to some more recent football management games the statistics do look a little sparse – 300+ clubs in 5 countries (England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy) and 8,000 or so players – but to me that wasn’t a particular problem. All the player stats you’d expect to find are there, coupled with relatively advanced training options to improve their skills.

So, aside from the lack of aesthetics (there is no sound whatsoever), what exactly is the problem with this game? It’s all in the interface really – the concept of playing a game revolving round meetings that you set up (or are set up for you) with various staff members and other interested parties sounds fine, but with the maze of somewhat un-logical menu subsystems to negotiate and the fact that certain things seem to reset almost at random without telling you means that the game is absolutely no fun at all to play. Coupled with the rather dull match display this means that what we have here is quite possibly one of the most boring games of all time. I don’t know if the more recent edition of this game is any better, but to me this game represents a serious retrograde step from the one of its precursors that I played years ago – and that can’t entirely be attributed to me not liking the genre as much as I did. Playing this game feels tiresome, not involving, and that just can’t be a good thing. Curiously there doesn’t seem to be an option to play it in full screen mode, perhaps indicating that the programmers realised the only way to play this game for any length of time was if you were doing something else simultaneously!! If while running it you swap to a program that does use full screen (I don’t think it matters whether it actually changes the resolution) or if the computer goes to standby, the game will crash. It also just crashed on my while I was typing this. Not good…

It all started so brightly too – with getting the game so cheaply to finding there was actually a printed manual inside (very rare with very cheap games!), to the option of installing it in more than one language. Actually playing the game soon changed my optimism however.

If for some bizarre reason you still want to get this, here are the system specs:

OS – Win 98 / 2000 / XP
CPU – P3 1GHz (hard to imagine why this game needs all that power even with all the stats!)
Memory – 128Mb
HDD space – 100Mb
Graphics card: must support “Texture and Lighting” under DirectX (again I find myself asking, why?!?!?

DirextX 9.0 is supplied on the CD-ROM.


Related Links

FIFA 2000


Recommended: No