I purchased the game on Saturday 19th March, for ?4.99 from the website play.com, which is the cheapest I have been able to find. HMV are very reasonable at ?7.99, Game and Virgin tolerable at ?9.99, and WH Smith ridiculous at ?4.99. Naturally, before I even attempted to play, I went to the website www.cm5patch.com and downloaded and installed the update. It is absolutely essential that you do this straightaway, and do not play the game until it is done, to ensure that your version is as bug free and smooth as possible, plus it is nice to have an up-to-date database. The download is not too large and, as it is a self-extractor, very simple to install, so you shouldn’t find it inconveniences you much at all. When the game and patch were all installed and ready to go, I double clicked the Championship Manager 5 icon to get my first view of what this game had it store.

The initial impression I got of the design was not at all encouraging. The boldness and simplicity of it all looked, to my eyes, very tacky and unpleasantly basic. True, some will see it as a return to the simple look of the great CM3 series, but to me it looks like an attempt at this which has not been done properly, and in all respects the design looks rushed. This may be a good sign, showing they were more interested in developing the quality of the game than making it look nice, however, this would go against all my experiences of Eidos in the past. I clicked the ‘Play Game?button, and started a new game selecting the English, Spanish and Italian leagues. I thought this would be a good place to start my experience, as there were enough leagues to show how it performed with a lot going on, but not enough to make it unbearably slow, should the promises made about processing speed be proved false. I then took charge of my favourite team, Chelsea, which is always the first game I play CM with, and also seemed like a good place to start as the high transfer budget would allow me to investigate that area of the game thoroughly. The load time was refreshingly quick, and before I knew it, I was the Chelsea manager about to embark on a brand new game.

At the beginning, the interface baffled me. As expected, everything is totally different to previous CM’s, and to start with, finding your way around is exceptionally difficult. However, once you get the hang of it, you find that in many respects the usability is actually improved. I now find going from place to place is much quicker than before, not much requiring more than one or two clicks, and that many areas of the game, such as the squad selection screens and player search functions, are much more convenient and easy to use. In fact, all in all, I would say switching between screens and finding your way round, once you are used to it, is easier than it ever has been before, and is one factor which I prefer about CM5 to FM2005.

As usual when it comes to playing CM, the first thing I did was begin to think about transfers. Even when the team I start with is perfect, I like to buy and sell and put my own personal stamp on the team, so whenever the transfer window is open, the thing which preoccupies my most is looking around for players, making offers, trying to sell, which is very handy as it allowed me a good chance to investigate the database of players as well as the transfers engine of CM5. My first impressions of the actual database was that it was lazy. It seemed that, especially when confirmed to the database of FM2005, the research was no-where near as thorough. Many players were not given their full names, and many names were spelt wrong. To give just a couple of examples, the Russian player called Alexandr Kerzhakov on FM2005 (and in real life) is called Kerzhakov on CM5, the Chelsea scout who’s real name, and name on FM2005, Andre Villas Boas, is simply called Andre Villas on CM5. Furthermore, many of the Chelsea staff, and I’m assuming staff of other clubs, were missed out, CM5 including only the members of staff listed on the club website as if looking at this website had been the full extent of their research. While none of these things are particularly important to the game play, it is nice to have things as accurate as possible and the rushed look it gave to the game was a little worrying. However, while this aspect of the database is bad, many of the other aspects are far better. The players positions, for example, seem to be much more flexible and realistic than before. CM5 seems to take into account for the first time that players don’t necessarily have just one position, which they must play in, and therefore there are few players who don’t have more than one. True, FM2005 has improved in this respect in it’s latest update, but still it is behind CM5 which has a lot more realism in it’s player positions. The values also seem a bit more realistic too, the European Cup starts such as Dellas and Basinas have values and stats which respect the quality of their performances in that competition, and the same goes for many of the Czech and Portuguese players. The quality and respective values of various players does seem to me to be very accurate, and this is one area in which my early fears that it would be poor seem to have been unfounded.

However, on the subject of the players stats, something I just cannot get used to and don’t think I ever will is the stats being out of 100. Yes, it’s probably a better and more accurate way of doing it, but the fact remains that you can glance at a player profile where the stats are out of 20 and immediately decide what you think of him and I, for one, just cant do this with stats out of 100. I have to go down and look at every single stat, adding up constantly in my mind, do decide whether the player is good enough, and while I do expect I will get more used to it, I am sure I will never find it as easy as I did with stats out of 20. However, there is an option to change to stats to be in values of 20 which I haven’t tried yet and, while this may well cause them to be less accurate, looks like it will rend this problem irrelevant, and, to be honest, if the values out of 20 are accurate to the values out of 100, it will be nice to have both options.

Having looked around at the big name players, and found myself satisfied with their stats and values, I decided I would have a look round for less well know talent. I sent my scouts off to Italy, Spain and Germany, and started looking for undiscovered stars. As I didn’t know where to start, I started by looking for the young stars I had found in FM2005 and went from there, checking out them and their teammates and such like. The scouting system is good, better than FM2005 in my opinion. Rather than setting a duration, you simply send them off and recall them when you want to, and rather than bombarding you with messages about their finds, they simply each file one weekly report which includes all their findings and opinions. This method is much better as it doesn’t take up as much inbox space, allows you to investigate the finds easier, and means that your scouts are never sitting idle. However, while the scouting system is very good, the scouts themselves aren’t. They do not find much at all, perhaps three or four players a fortnight, often filing weekly reports where they have found absolutely nothing, and what they do find is rarely particularly desirable. They don’t state the obvious like they did in FM2005, things like ‘Theirry Henry would be a decent signing? which is nice, but I would say about 4 out of 5 of the players they find, and they don’t find many, I don’t even give a second glance to. Even more worrying is the fact that my efforts proved equally fruitless. I’m not sure whether it was because I couldn’t judge them properly, not being able to read the stats out of 100, or because there simply aren’t very many good undiscovered talents in the game, something which would worry me greatly and could cause the game to become seriously problematic after a few seasons have been played. Maybe it’s just me, but for some reason or other, both with scouts and with myself, I found that finding young or undiscovered talents was exceptionally difficult, much too difficult. Interestingly this is the opposite to FM2005 where it is too easy, but still, from my experiences so far, I would definitely say FM2005 is the superior of the two in this respect.

Now that I had looked around at the players, and found/failed to find players that interested me, I decided to go the next step and enter into the transfer market. I put down a large variety of bids, from big money on big stars to smaller bids on lesser known people, bids far above the value and bids below, in an attempt to find out exactly what is accepted and what isn’t. I also listen a few players I didn’t particularly want, namely Geremi, Johnson and Kezman, to see how it all worked from the other end of the spectrum. I shall talk about buying players first. From what I have seen before, the CM5 transfer system seems to be very good. What really impressed me is that certain clubs, especially those with worse finances, are more willing to sell than others. Roma, for example, seemed willing to accept any decent offer were as Milan only accepted offers which were ginormous. This is a realistic aspect of the game which I have not seen before, and which I really liked. There’s less messing around with installments and things, which I personally like although it’s less realistic, and when clubs set you a target to reach, it is usually not ridiculously unfair, yet the biggest stars just cant be bought for any price, Kaka for example, which is probably accurate to real life also. All in all, I thought the way offers were accepted or denied, the amounts you had to pay and the rising in negotiating was very fair and in many ways realistic, definitely as good as FM2005 and maybe even slightly better. However, I do have one major criticism when it comes to buying players, and that is the Work Permit system. In real life, if you want to buy a foreign player, you get him. In CM, in many cases, you don’t. I found Work Permits were refused at a rate far greater than ever before and, unlike FM2005, you cant appeal. This really annoyed me and is my one major concern with the CM5 transfer system, one area where I think it has taken a major step backwards.

When it came to selling my players, again all in all I was quite impressed. Unlike previous CM’s, other teams are not afraid to actually come in and make offers, the amount of offers being proportional to the price, as is understandable. What I didn’t like was the fact that the offers are always a little lower than the price you set, and that when you set them a price to pay they always work gradually towards it rather than coming right out with a bid. However, I could live with this, but one thing which really annoyed me is that you cannot offer players to clubs. This is a great shame, when this was first implemented I thought it was a great idea and CM5 seems really foolish in removing it. Luckily, most teams which do want the player do bid, but still, offering players means you can offer special deals to certain clubs and makes selling generally much easier, and it is very inconvenient that it has been removed. Despite this, the fact that clubs do actually bid, and the speed at which these deals are usually concluded, has caused me to like this part of the game, though maybe not quite as much as selling in FM2005.