I’ve done my 20 hours, that’s 38 games played which means 76 clicks of the down arrow to start each half.. and 228 continue clicks to start the match… but am I disappointed, no, does it need some work, absolutely.
Off the bat my initial opinion on the Arcade/Console/Touch feel is because of the Portal, in FM24 you would have a weighted mix of where you landed whether it was your Inbox or the Home Page, in FM26 you land in the Portal meaning clicking continue bypasses the need to hit continue through every item in your inbox. I know this because I’ve been doing just that, I haven’t touched training, set-pieces, recruitment focuses… nothing. I’ve been ploughing hours into games and it’s been tough.
One Pager
How it Was
Having spent my time playing games I’ve spent a lot of time in the tactics screen. I understand IP & OoP but can I make a tactic, can I heck, I’m playing as Chelsea and you would like to think that their squad has enough depth to make a poor tactic work but it doesn’t. I’ve tinkered like a madman and when I say tinkered I have pretty much reduced the tactic to as basic as I can without it being a default setting. I haven’t had the ability to save a tactic and equally I don’t have the option to load a downloaded one, so I have had to raw-dog it and make the best of it which has been testing for me, I found myself being irrationally angry at the kids yesterday and it was a result of being pissed off at this game, so they were promptly loaned out to our feeder club (Grandparents).
I will say, on the tactics page there is an advice button which gives you notes on areas of your tactic that can leave you exposed but there’s also next opposition advice which leads me to two things, one, you get really handy advice on how to play the opposition (albeit it looks a bit buggy) and two, when you’re going in to a match I can’t see where or how you set your opposition instructions, on FM24 I would do this just before kicking off, now I’m having to pause, go into the tactics screen and then add them.
As it’s a Beta I don’t like to slam the game when there are bugs because that’s the point of a Beta but I’ve had a couple that tested my resolve. The first was in a game, I wasn’t paying attention and the squad screen came up (you know when someone’s been sent off or injured), there was no info, all my players were on the screen, no red injured sign and when I clicked continue it said I couldn’t because there was an injured player on the pitch, I had to guess who the injured player was and it felt like I was doing one of those put the drinks in the right order games! The second nearly game ending bug I had was in the game preparation screen, Cucurella was listed on the bench but he was injured and then I couldn’t remove him from his position, I tried everything, I couldn’t clear the squad, couldn’t drag and move him literally stuck - I even tried instant result and that didn’t work either. My last shot was putting myself on holiday which worked but obviously I missed out on playing against Fulham. These things happen but my god I was raging!
Another small thing that I came across was my loan player assessment, how did this screen get through, 3 players visible with 24 out on loan with plenty of screen real estate!
While playing the game I have been watching FM26 YouTube videos and the game looks so good when the footage is edited, so many extra clicks and screens aren’t seen during the videos whereas when you’re playing there are so many, as I mentioned at the start, just starting a match is click, click, click, click, click, click and then for my own personal preference I minimise the player bar at the bottom which defaults back to it’s original size for the second half… so another click. I digress, watching WorkTheSpace’s Manchester United video I saw gameplay that I hadn’t seen in my own save, direct-over-the-top passing to Sesko who rounded the keeper and scored, all I seem to get is players falling over the ball and knocking it to the opposition!
I have no problems admitting that the game is challenging me but the logical part of me says that’s what we want, to be challenged, in FM24 we would unconciously click through the game, during a match we knew what changes to make to impact it and we knew how the roles and attributes of players would mould our squad building. FM26 isn’t that but I think once the UI/UX is improved and is less ‘clunky’ there are LOADS of nice features in the game that will make spending 1000 hours plus in it a piece of cake.