Review: Football Tycoon
Score:
70%
Managing a football team is easy, countless games have shown you how. But owning a football team... that's a different matter. Can Football Tycoon show us the way forward?
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It's not easy putting together a Football Management game on a mobile device. With a million statistics and fans demanding realism, it's tough to manage a computer team.
But is Football really about the money? Dynamo Games don't think so. For them, football is all about one thing. Making money. And that's the focus of their latest game Football Tycoon. While you might be distracted in ensuring your team win their matches, or that the fans are happy with the on-field performance, the ultimate goal is the accumulation of wealth. If that involves buying a club, draining away all its resources to your own wallet while watching a once proud team fall through the league(!), then so be it.
That's if you can stomach being an incredibly ruthless, heartless club owner. Of which many fans would say is true for their own club, but that's an argument for another site.
So, a different take on a management game, Football Tycoon immediately has something to stand out from the crowd with. It's also ideally suited to a small screen, limited input platform such as a mobile phone – the visualisation of the towns and cities in isometric view scrolls nicely, showing you the different areas you can interact with (such as the fans, the stadium or the dreaded Bank Manager) without being difficult to control.
On starting a game, you'll be presented with a number of characters to be, all of whom have made their money in different areas of the economy. Thanks to that, each has slightly different capabilities (such as the construction magnate being able to build new stadium for below the listed cost).
Less effective is the ability to visit Nightclubs and Casinos to walk around and meet people and build up a relationship with them. This switches to a top down walk around, like a cheap clone of The Sims, and while you can gamble some of your money as a fast track route to fortune (or more likely, lose it all), it feels clunky and not as polished as the rest of the game.
Given the underlying goal of Football Tycoon is your own personal wealth, you'll need to decide how much to invest in the club, and how much to hold back. You start with $40 million in your own bank account, and you'll need to transfer some of this to the club to get them started.
One of the interesting areas of Football Tycoon is how it takes away the regular “manage players and watch their stats during a game” that is the norm in a Football management game. Instead you can have just as much success if you have an average team but are successful in poaching away rival fans (every team you could choose has a rival team in the same city, to facilitate this). And if you can run the club well as a business that brings in the cash, then do you really need to have victory and top of the table positions every year?
The truth, and winning strategy, as always, lie somewhere in between all these options, balancing the needs of the competing claims on limited resources. It's familiar ground for the strategy fan, and they'll be the ones drawn towards it. Those looking for a regular football sim will probably stay as well, once they get over the initial “ooh this is different” thoughts when first playing the game.
My only niggle about the game is that it is just a little bit unfocussed. Maybe that's down to it being a mobile game, and the developers looking to keep everything simple, but the options available are not comprehensive. If this was on a physically larger platform, say a home PC or one of the consoles, then I'd expect it to deliver a lot more, and perhaps then its vein of humour, balanced with a myriad options, would shine through. As it stands, by restricting the choices available, this feels like a “lite” version of a much bigger game.
That doesn't make it unplayable, far from it. Football Tycoon should be welcomed with open arms by strategy fans, but it misses out on that certain something that would make it into an addictive enough title that would appeal to everyone.
-- Ewan Spence, May 2009.
Update: I've spoken to the developers.The game is launching on the UK mobile operators today [May 28th] and tommorrow. Only t-Mobile is slightly later on the 11th June. So you just go direct onto your WAP homepage and should find it under the games section. The rest of Europe will be rolled out after this.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at