Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

There are two words that serve to explain why this years cash cow is one to miss. Those two words are Slow & broken.

Slow describes the game as a whole which huffs and puffs along like an arthritic snail. Computers were designed to crunch numbers, it's what they do. FM is a game of number crunching and as such should tear along at breakneck speeds, especially with modern hardware. True it must calculate an astonishing amount of data but no more than last years version which does it three times faster; in fact in order to get the same speed as FM2012 achieves running every nation and league in the game FM2013 can only manage five nations leagues. This is clearly an optimisation issue and I suspect it has a lot to do with the bloated and messy code that has resulted over years of updates, changes and programmer changes. At some point I would imagine that SI will need to bite the bullet and rewrite the entire game from the ground up.

Broken refers to the match engine which has ruined the game for many players, especially since the last two so called patches, leaving many on the SI forums asking for ways to roll back the updates. The ball physics are all over the place, outfield players shoot from anywhere while the defenders go walkabout and the goalkeepers need a labotomy. It is quite simply the worst match engine for a very long time and should never have made it past initial beta tests. As if that wasn't enough, some of the problems that existed when the demo was released like the ball never slowing down and acting like it was on ice have not to this date been fixed. Honestly, these problems overshadow any improvments to other parts of the game so save your money and pick up a budget priced copy of FM2012 while you wait for the 2014 version to come along.