Disclaimer: When football is mentioned in this review, it is referring to what most Americans call soccer.
Most football games focus their attention to what happens on the pitch. At the end of the day, that is what really matters in the world of football. But with the rise of media, tabloids, and the paparazzi, many fans and supporters like to know what shenanigans their favorite athletes get into off the pitch. This is something that the football genre doesn’t focus much on, until now. Lords of Football gives you the task of managing a football club and giving them what they need to be successful on and off the pitch.
Lords of Football begins with you selecting a team you would like to manage. First you must choose between England, Spain, Germany, Italy or France. Once you’ve selected a country, you can choose any club in the top two tiers of football in that league. Since the game is not officially licensed, the clubs use names so it is easy to figure out their real life counterpart. For example, Manchester United is Manchester Reds, or Arsenal is known as London Gunners. The game does feature the ability to edit the clubs name, kits, players, and crest. This allows players to import real life clubs into the game, with a little bit of work of course. The club editor is not too robust. You won’t be able to correctly replicate Barcelona’s home and away kits, or their crest (or anyone’s crest for that matter), but it is fun to toy around and see what you can come up with.
Depending on the club you choose also selects your difficulty level. The easiest difficulty is playing with the counterpart of teams like Barcelona, Bayern Munich, etc. To ramp up the difficulty, you can select a club in the second tier of that countries football league, and try to get them promoted. It encourages players to use smaller clubs and build them up to be the, well, lord of football.
After you have decided to manage a club, you will enter into one part of the game: training and after hours. It should be noted that the game switches between training and a match every day. You will not spend three or four days on the training ground preparing for a match. You play a match, then go to training, then a match, then training, rinse and repeat. It would have been nice to have a few days off between matches to let your players take the day off, or maybe do a team building exercise for the day. It gets incredibly repetitive after just a few games. The training session and a match take about 30 minutes total. Multiply that by a full domestic and European tournament, and you’re looking at over 50 games in one season. There is the ability to simulate games and speed up time while training with helps cut down on the time. Simulating a match can affect your team negatively as you can not give commands during the game (more on that later).
Training begins with the players arriving at the training grounds in the morning. There are different parts of the ground for you to assign players to, like the main pitch, small pitch, track, gym, dressing room, physio, or psychiatrist. These different areas will increase the attributes for your players over time. There is a system that works pretty well built into the game where you can filter players by their lowest attribute. If you want to put all the players with low stamina attributes in the gym, it is easy to select all of them at one time. A problem comes when you accidentally leave a filter on and select a large amount of players that you did not mean to. This was a very common occurrence, which resulted in having to place players back all over the training ground.
Once all the players are assigned to different areas you just sit there and watch them do the same thing over and over. Once the official training hours are over, you can dismiss your players, or force them to stay. If the players are forced to stay, their mood will decrease quickly, so it is pretty wise to get them off the training pitch as soon as possible. Once they get changed in the dressing room, the players will head out for a night on the town.
This is supposed to be the part that makes Lords of Football unique, but it felt like a feature that was rushed at the end of development. Your players will head out to various businesses in the town, like the pub or restaurant. If a player feels like his ego hasn’t been fed enough, he can go to the fan club or the local radio and be showered in praise. Where the players end up for the night life depends on their needs, which can be viewed in the player profile. It is a bit hard to figure out how you are supposed to read the meters that determine what your players need. For example none of my players showed that they needed “sex,” but when I changed one of the business to feature “pole dancing,” 13 of my players showed up and stayed all night.
It is also very cumbersome to figure out what your players need. A simple table that showed what your players need would have been extremely helpful. Instead you have to rely on the filters that were mentioned earlier. These filters just show an image above a players of what they want. Also, don’t click on any of the players by accident or you’ll select all of them that need “food” and mess up your entire training session.
Over time your players will become addicted to their lifestyle and it can affect their training and performance in matches. If a player is addicted to, let’s say partying, you can just drop them into the psychiatrists office to get them sorted out slowly, or punish them on the small pitch. Punishing players drops the need of that item quicker than therapy, but the punishment will not last as long as therapy. Being addicted to different things will affect the players’ attributes, so getting them clean quickly is beneficial to the club.
The most frustrating is when you get a message after a match saying “some of your players do not feel like training today.” When you look around the town you’ll find them at the pub or a restaurant. Logically you think, “okay, if I just drag them to the training ground, they will get changed and start working.” Nope, if you drag them to the training ground they just walk straight back to where they were previously. For a game that promotes itself of having control over your players, it does not feel like your actions to much to influence the game.
The second part of the game is playing the actual matches, which feels and plays like a Football Manager clone. The biggest difference is the ability to pause the match and take control of your team. You can do things like tell a player to make a run to this area, pass to a certain player, or shoot on goal. Sometimes it takes a lot longer for the players to register a move you told them to make, and they will end up just giving the ball away. Once again it is a good idea that was not executed well.
There is not much to look at in Lords of Football. The animation during training is decent, and in matches it is passable at best. The game has a Sims-vibe to it, but even then it may be on par with The Sims 2 graphics. It has a good soundtrack that keeps you awake during training sessions, and the little voice work there is in the game is very football-esque.
On paper Lords of Football sounds like it would be a great game. It is essentially Football Manager mixed with The Sims. Unfortunately none of the features in Lords of Football are executed well. Football Manager fans will not like it because it does not feature the depth those games have. At the same time fans of simulated life games will not get into it either because of the lack of content of feeling of control of the players. In the end Lords of Football is just kind of in the middle of two genres, not knowing what to do or where to go next. So it just heads to the pub instead of training, which main explain quite a bit about the game.
Score: 5/10
Lords of Football was developed Geniaware SRL and published by Fish Eagle for PC on April 5. A copy of the game was provided to us by Fish Eagle for reviewing purposes.
