It’s been a while since I did one of these reviews, isn’t it? With that in mind, I guess it’s time to have a look at one of the newest football management games available on Steam right now.
I picked this particular title up in Steam’s winter sale and played through a season in the first week of the new decade. Is it any good? Well…
Strap yourselves in, folks, because this is Club Soccer Director PRO 2020.
BACKGROUND
Club Soccer Director PRO 2020 is developed and published by Go Play Games Ltd, who are based in Rushden, Northamptonshire. Their chief executive is Jim Scott – a 40-something UEFA B-licenced football coach who works part-time for Northampton Town.
Scott is no newcomer to video games, having developed boxing title Out For The Count on the ZX Spectrum way back in 1989, when he was still a teenager. He later released a couple of football management games on multiple platforms – Jimmy’s Soccer Manager in 1991, and Jimmy’s Super League in 1993.
After disappearing from the scene for a while, Scott resurfaced in summer 2017 with the freemium mobile title Club Soccer Director 2018. That was followed up a year later by Club Soccer Director 2019, with the third iteration coming out last August on Google Play and the App Store.
The next step was to release a premium version for us PC gamers. After some delays, CSD PRO 20 – as I’m calling it for short – was released on Steam on 26 September 2019, costing £19.99 (€19.99 in the EU; $24.99 in the USA). That’s only half what you’d expect to pay for Football Manager 2020, but is it worth the money? Let’s find out…
STARTING OUT
When you start a career on CSD PRO 20, you’ll be asked to enter your name, nationality, language, and the country you’d prefer to manage in. When it comes to nationality, instead of picking one from a list, you can type in literally anything you want. “Are you Turkish?” “No, I’m Peckish.”
After that, you’ll get to design your manager’s face (which always goes well on Football Manager). Male and female avatars are available, and there are many customisation options at your disposal.
As the title of this game suggests, you’ll be playing not as a manager, but as a director of football (or ‘sporting director’, to our continental friends). You’ll be mainly in charge of hiring/firing staff, signing/selling players, upgrading facilities, and signing sponsorship deals.
Like in many football games with mobile roots, there are two different currencies. While most transactions are carried out with money, you can use ‘coins’ for various tasks such as training staff. You start with 100,000 coins (or 30,000 on the freemium mobile version), though you’ll earn more as you progress. And yes, you can buy coins with real in-game money (MICRO-TRANSACTION ALERT!).
There are three game modes. In ‘Career Mode’, you’ll begin at a lower-league club and have to work your way up. ‘Create A Club’ allows you to build your own team from scratch and (hopefully) lead them to the top. ‘Choose Any Club’ lets you start anywhere, though major clubs like Liverpool and Barcelona will expect immediate results.
WHAT I LIKED
One of the things I like about this game is that you can be pretty much as hands-on (or hands-off) as you want. Your manager names the matchday squad and makes his own substitutions, though you can make your own changes before and during games. Just remember that if you frequently interfere with team selections or reject your manager’s requests, he might get annoyed – and potentially even quit on the spot.
All players – and most staff members – have their preferred playing styles, which really makes you think that little bit harder about long-term planning. In other words, it won’t do much good appointing the next Pep Guardiola as your manager if your current crop of non-league journeymen prefer direct or long-ball tactics.
The game also keeps an array of player statistics – perhaps more than any other football management game that isn’t developed by Sports Interactive. With regards to the other kind of ‘stats’, players have skill ratings in five categories as well as an overall rating. That’s a bit simplistic for my tastes, but it’s certainly more welcoming to newer players.
Lastly, I find the art style to be quite attractive. I’m also sure that fans of retro football games will love the top-down Sensible Soccer-style match view and player graphics. Just don’t expect this title to appear on a Royal Mail stamp any time soon, though…
WHAT I DIDN’T
Unfortunately, the match engine is as basic as the graphics, if not more so. If you’re one of those FM20 managers who gets disgruntled when your strikers keep missing one-on-ones, CSD PRO 20 might turn you into Charles Bronson.
Obviously, footballers make mistakes all the time, but the decision-making on display in this game can be genuinely baffling. Players can (and do) shoot from distance when they have just the keeper to beat. Goalkeepers seem very hesitant to move more than a couple of yards at a time, and the defenders? I’ve seen Daniel Farke’s Norwich do a better job of defending their goal.
The transfer market is… chaotic, not to mention unrealistic. I’ve seen Ilkay Gundogan sign for Manchester United, who also turned Magaye Gueye (yes, he of Everton and Millwall infamy!) into a 50-goal striker. More alarming to me was that our National League South rivals – Chippenham, Tonbridge Angels, et al – had plenty of Dutch, Brazilian, Japanese and other foreign players by the end of January.
“Chaotic” could also describe the user interface, which is clearly designed for mobile devices and hasn’t been optimised to take advantage of larger monitor resolutions.
The developers appeared to have crammed in several visual ‘features’ just because they can: newspaper front pages, Sky Sports News-style graphics, you name it. You can also phone other sporting directors, but only to negotiate loan deals. Other types of transfers require you to discuss a contract with the player’s agent.
My biggest bug-bear with this game, though, is those pesky micro-transactions. For a game retailing at nearly £20, you’d expect to have the full product straight out of the box (so to speak; there is no boxed version yet). You wouldn’t expect to have to pay MORE money (or grind through several seasons) just to boost your reputation enough to get a job at a bigger club.
Mercifully, you won’t be bombarded with advertisements for these money-grabs – unlike another game I’ve reviewed in the past. Even so, this is EXACTLY the kind of thing that would make Jim Sterling’s blood boil.
WE MUST TALK ABOUT
Grammar. Now I’m quite the stickler for good spelling and grammar, to put it politely. That said, I can forgive a few grammatical slip-ups here and there in a well-made video game. Unfortunately, this game is littered with so many that a lot of the dialogue reads like it was written by a current Premier League youth-team player!
When one of your players gets injured for more than a few days, your physio will use errant apostrophes (e.g. 2 weeks’, 6 month’s). I’ve also seen some words unnecessarily capitalised, and I lost count of the number of times I saw “have” substituted for “of” (e.g. “could of”, “appeared to of”).
This is particularly galling to me. Last July, before the game launched, I spotted a “should of” on one of the preview screenshots and reported it to the developers on Twitter. They replied, “A few errors remain which will be sorted before launch,” but guess what? It’s been six months and those errors still haven’t been sorted!
Good grammar probably shouldn’t be that important here; after all, this is only a video game. I would argue that if the writing is so poor, how on Earth are we supposed to take the rest of the game seriously?!
SUMMARY
Let’s be honest; CSD PRO 20 is not a £20 PC title. To put things in perspective, you could buy Football Manager Touch 2020 on Steam for only £2 more. I bought this when it was 75% off, and £5 would be a reasonable price to pay – if you actually got the full game instead of having limited options at the start.
That’s not to say this is a bad game. There’s certainly potential in an attractive football simulation where you play the role of ‘sporting director’ as opposed to ‘manager’. Unfortunately, thanks to an array of amateurish mistakes, this is currently more Gianluca Nani than Txiki Begiristain.
FULLER FM RATING: 2* – National League.
If you have enjoyed reading this review, feel free to let me know your thoughts, either in the comments below or on Twitter @Fuller_FM.
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