Football’s coming home to PC.
I don’t like football. For me its tribalism and pointlessly overhyped. I can respect peoples liking for it, growing up near the local football ground my weekends were usually filled with cheers and boos during the football season. But combining football with managing is something I can get behind, and while an experience like Football Manager does not appeal to me New Star Manager has enough appeal, being built for phones and developing a much simpler structure.
In sum, New Star Manager is a blend of turn-based strategy and football management. But within a pretty fun cycle the worst of mobile gaming comes forward. While playing is tactical, if not particularly well built for mouse and keyboard the managing is very much built for mobile and as such kind of boring.
The matches themselves play pretty much automatically. You get a blow-by-blow account of what is happening, dropping into the match when there is a chance at scoring. You move players around in semi-real-time, time only moving when the players do. It’s a little rough around the edges when it comes to controlling the characters but with a little time you’ll learn how they move. You can alter a few factors while not in control, such as whether the team is more offence or defence focused and the effort they put in. But overall you will be only really doing the goal shots and nothing else.
Outside of this you manage the facilities around your football ground. With these you can recruit new players, train or heal your current players and look for sponsorships for your grounds and players. You buy and upgrade everything to improve people’s opinion of you and the amount of money and cards you get. You see the cycle coming into place, win matches to get more money to get better players to win more matches.
Cards are the mainstay point of the game, gain cards and you can influence play, improve team coherence and dose your players with energy drink. This is very much where you feel the format of mobile gaming. Everything is drag-and-drop as well as big button controls. It doesn’t really affect the PC experience too much but I feel that on mobile there would be a few ad-based ways to gain more cards and retries at goals.
Overall the game is pretty plain beyond this. Graphically the game looks like a mobile game with a generous upscale for PC. Audio wise the sounds are pretty much spot-on with plenty of cheering and booing from the crowd. I can’t imagine this game looking or being bad on mobile.
But it feels like there is a generous gap where advertisements would be placed. A quick search reveals adverts are a big part of the game. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem the PC experience has been tailored to work around those gaps and they are just left there. This is just something you’ll have to suck up and deal with unfortunately.
New Star Manager is a nice and fairly simple football management game. It could be better on mobile, but for the PC experience it is decidedly average and perfectly inoffensive. A football manager for those who hate Football Manager if that sentence makes sense. While the mobile design does hamper slightly, it doesn’t stop the general gameplay cycle being rounded and the game from being fun.
Grab New star Manager Here
Check out an interview we did with the developer Simon Read Here
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