I was an enormous fan of New Star Soccer back in the day, as it scratched all the right itches for someone who really likes playing sports RPGs - it had a solid representation of the actual sport you were meant to be playing, it had teammate drama, love affairs, long term grudges and it allowed you to shower your girlfriend in hanggliders.
So I was surprised that I somehow missed the release of New Star Manager!
It’s great!
You’ve moved now from being a player to a manager, obvs, and you get to control both on and off field aspects of the team, like team lineups, formations, player transfers, sponsorship deals, stadium infrastructure and press conferences.
So far, so similar, but then the game starts giving you cards to play.
Your staff generate these cards on a cooldown that gets shorter as you upgrade your facilities and you can also earn others through interactions with your board or the fans from events that pop up, or from successful press conferences. The press will ask you questions like “what’s the name of your scout” or “how many more games will [player] miss through injury” and you have a few seconds to answer correctly, so you better be paying attention.
These generated cards can be just energy drinks to replenish tired players, but they can also be stat improvements, cards that change a player’s position, or things like guaranteed successful contract negotiations, allowing you to definitely get another twenty games out of that star forward before he asks for more money.
You get to chose which players get these cards, so you can develop young talent, or try to pump the stats of your established stars.
On the field the game is a lot of fun too, with some clever touches. In defence you don’t get to do anything as the game will use text to tell you about the other team’s attacks, the result and who, if anyone, was the hero or was to blame. When you’re on the attack though, you get full control over your team - you can “paint” lines on the field to show individual players where to run, chose where to pass and how hard, dribble the ball and then pick your spot to unleash a thunderbastard shot on goal. At this point a ball bounces across the screen and you have to click on it where you want to make contact - too low and the ball can fly over the bar… hit the wrong side and you can spoon the shot into the crowd.
It looks a bit like this.
Overall, great fun so far.
