No one has rated this review as helpful yet
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 78.5 hrs on record (51.3 hrs at review time)
Posted: 11 Jun, 2022 @ 4:50am

I got it for 4$ and I wouldn't pay more, recommendation stands for this price.
I only buy those for player/manager career.
Therefore the review goes mostly about single player with AI.

At the moment of the review I played 3 full seasons of player career.
The mode has been redesigned in a way I can't fully comprehend.
They rightfully recognized previous system with achievements was incredibly bad and had to be replaced.
The main problems it had was too fast spike, unbalanced training sessions that were easy, fast and gave necessary progress very fast, broken scoring system, non-existent contract - you were obliged to play until death if you played too good, disconnected RPG aspect of the mode - you just play on the pitch and nothing else exists example of which was hilarious 5000$ contract while being the best player in the world basically.

Now what has been solved of those?
Scoring system is only slightly bugged. Just that.
However, the system provides something interesting but also so ridiculously disconnected from actual gameplay I'm not sure if I'm impressed. They basically implemented Assassin's Creed abilities tree. The hilarious aspect of this but which is also quite cool as a possibility to be fair is changing position, abilities and even physicality of the player. This is a nice option to explore different roles in team without starting career over but this obviously super disconnects from the already mentioned RPG aspect of the mode.
This kinda cool feature has another easily fixable issue which is very low ceiling. It's still achieved super fast, even faster than previously. And it's too low, it's so disappointing getting max 87 OVR. So the grind finishes pretty past.
So the new system is ok, but still far from achieving desired design and I don't think it's going in a good direction.

Going back to overall career experience there is also new manager rating system and match objectives which are.. pretty dumb. Your personal objective which affects your manager rating (starting XI, bench) are sometimes team objectives (get 65% possession) which I assure you cannot be done on high difficulty unless you spam requesting pass and somehow don't lose a ball. For some reason manager rating decays with time. I don't know what purpose it serves. I guess it forces you to train (which at max XP do nothing but gaining you manager rating).

Funny thing, career seems to really struggle with combining clubs and country matches, animations, trainings.
I had title race which I lost in last game - but won the match. The commentary were well logically handled but I ended with trophy in the dressing room anyway.
When I won international title we celebrated - obviously - with my club manager.
I got injured for 220 days and my manager just sold me because my rating decayed to me being a zero in his eyes.

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general gameplay angry noises:
- Goalkeepers are absolutely garbage. They can't defend 35m distance shot which goes 5km/h but have reflexes to throw themselves into far corner when power shot goes from inside the box
- good luck getting free kicks, in my entire 3 season career there were 5 fouls in total 3 of which were made by me when clashing into a running dude, the 2 other were fouls on goalkeepers
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