Championship Manager 2010 Demo Review

I've spent a decent amount of time in the last couple of years playing Football Manager (5,000 hours and 16.5 minutes, to be exact), and in that time I've heard a lot about the wonders of the "other" management program, i.e. Championship Manager. However, since my management days started relatively recently, I've never tried the Championship Manager series. Now the series has been revived, and Championship Manager 2010 is the result of TWO years of serious work-CM 2009 was skipped in order to catch up to Sega's Football Manager. Keep in mind however, that the version out now is a demo, which is technically a beta version. That said, on to the review!

Appearances:
To those used to FM, the user interface takes some getting used to. The blue background is quite nice, and everything seems quite polished. Perhaps too polished-for my taste, the interface would be better if it were more usable and less slick. I found some things hard to get to quickly, especially in windowed mode. However, everything really does look nice, the background animations, scrolling news bar, and gradients all particularly slick. I just don't think they do a great job of making all the important parts of the game easy to reach, FM definitely doing a better job of keeping things clear and easy even on a small screen. In particular, having the bullet-style menu on the left is not particularly bright, as screen space is usually more limited vertically, obliging the user to constantly scroll or expand/contract the bullet points. In fact, while writing this, I've switched to FM to compare, and while the default skin is nothing spectacular looks-wise, it does a much better job of keeping all the different features and parts of your game accessible and organized. The layout is simply more intuitive and easier to find your way around.
Match Engine/3D
The match engine, which actually simulates the matches, clearly has received a lot of attention. The graphics look very good, even better than FM 2009. The match animations are smooth, and while there aren't too many of them, they're quite polished. The 3D implementation however, like with FM, has some issues. Or perhaps, it's not the 3D implementation itself, but rather the issues with the match engine that become clear when showed in 3D. Whatever it is, it becomes clear in 3D that the amazing run by your backup LB is actually total BS, he barely touched the ball, it merely bounced off a series of heels, knees, and arses, before falling perfectly placed for his crappy cross. Or that seemingly fantastic goal was your striker getting tackled multiple times, but having the ball bounce back to him after getting tackled by the defender. If these problems can be cleaned up before the final release, then the match engine and 3D implementation certainly can compete with FM's offering. In fact, the general graphics are better than FM's, and there are more options to tweak the graphics, theoretically letting someone with a laptop or a gaming machine tailor the graphics to what their machine can cope with. And even on my 3 year-old Macbook Pro running Bootcamp, the 3D matches were smooth and enjoyable to watch. It must be noted though that FM 2010 will be coming out shortly, and will surely have improved on the 2009 edition, so a final comparison will have to wait.
Manager Options and Features:
Scouting-Scouting is quite simple to set up. One can select a country or area, and select how much money is invested in scouting that area. Different scouts can also be assigned to scout specific players. Easy to set up, but the overall system is not nearly as good as FM's scouting system. One has far fewer options in terms of controlling the scouting, but in some ways this is good, as one has no option but to scout a player to get more accurate numbers for his ability, whereas on FM one a box one can tick in order to show all the numbers for a player, whether or not you've ever scouted him.
Training-Championship Manager has definitely sent a shot across FM's bow, with highly customizable training and drills. One can specify specific schedules for each player or position, with options such as Shooting, Attacking, and the slightly unclear "Move Training". In addition, one can design custom drills, to maximize different areas of a players technique. Another innovating and interesting feature is the ability to create original set-pieces. The set-pieces are quite easy to set up, with five different steps available. However, the implementation of the set-piece practice was not great, with the team almost getting worse at each set-piece the more it was practiced. Of course, much of that is due to the defence learning the set-piece procedure, but even so it could be implemented better. Matches between 1st team and Reserves are also easy to arrange, giving one the chance to watch tactics and players evolve in a less pressurized arena than a league match.

Conclusion
Overall, Championship Manager 2010 is a huge step in the right direction for the series, and will provide a viable alternative for the now-ubiquitous Football Manager series. The new features are very interesting, and certainly will be enough to interest players such as myself who have never played or considered Championship Manager. However, I don't think that this edition has quite the depth of Football Manager, and it also lacks the feeling that all of the features have been carefully designed and integrated in to the overall product. With FM, despite it's many bugs and issues, one nevertheless feels that everything is very well integrated, and that all the different parts of the game (training, player development, match practice, coaching) etc work together very well, creating a very realistic and enjoyable manager game. Championship Manager, despite it's interesting and and innovative features, doesn't quite manage to compete in terms of depth, realism, and long-term playability.