It is so easy to sit down to play this game for half an hour and still be sat hunched over the keyboard five hours later. There are now many more ways to interact with the players and press and players have more of a personality than ever before, with dressing room friendships and bust ups all apparent. You can take charge of every little part of training, contracts, match preparations, personal player-to-player relationships, media interaction. However, if you so desire, the involvement goes as deep as you could wish for. The genius of the system is that you can have fun whilst taking minimal charge of things and still feel satisfaction when your team wins. The engine behind the game is really quite staggering with over 40 leagues playable and over 200,000 players all present and correct. Equally challenging is taking charge of a big club, as the Board's and fans' expectations are so much higher.

Trying to take a small club from the Conference to the Premiership is very difficult but is a challenge not to be missed. The bad news for wives and girlfriends everywhere is that the gameplay remains as intense and addictive as ever. At least, as a Middlesbrough fan playing as Middlesbrough in the game, the defense are doing quite well but the forwards couldn't hit a barn door at ten paces. The players themselves now behave a lot more like their real life counterparts. If your center back has been out on the pop the night before a match and is responsible for conceding that first minute goal, this is now painfully apparent. Players are represented on the pitch by small round icons and this enables you to get much more idea how individuals are performing. The 2D match engine introduced in Championship Manager 4 remains and has been improved on significantly. The layout is clean and the menus easy to navigate. The graphics are entirely functional and do what they need to do. Critics condemn them for looking like glorified spreadsheets and they will not push that latest graphics card you splashed out on into even the mildest sweat. Championship Manager games have never been about the graphics.

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