I have been meaning to write this article for a while and get a few things off my chest about FM26. First of all, guys, I want to be brutally honest about my experiences with the latest edition of the game.
As an independent site with no affiliation to SI, we can tell the truth. There will be no glazing of SI, and I won’t sugar-coat anything. So, without further ado, here are my true feelings.
I hated the game for the first few hours
As somebody who has played the game since its Championship Manager days, I have maybe become slightly set in my ways. Perhaps I am uncomfortable with too many changes. Rightly or wrongly, I would have been happy with FM24, which I thought was the best FM in a long time, with some graphical and visual changes.
Put the new graphics on FM24, and I would have been content, but maybe not paying £40-odd for the privilege of the changes.
In truth, FM26 is almost an entirely new game, so it was never going to be that close to the games of the past. It has been changed to appeal to the console players. I don’t have an issue with that, as a former console player many lifetimes ago.
That is not my issue. I think the new UI is visually appealing. The problem is that it is so woefully clunky and not user-friendly. SI promised that there would be fewer clicks. Instead, you have more clicks and seem to need more mental effort to get from my screen to another.
This may sound strange, but the continue button being on the right side of the screen seems to annoy me more than it should. It just seems so impractical.
Yes, I hear people say, but you can always use the space bar to continue, but that’s not the point. Just put the continue button back on the left, and I will be far happier. Is there a way in the settings to move it back to the left-hand side of the screen? Even that small change would make me so much happier with the UI.
Where is it?
The other thing I have found annoying so far is that, even as a seasoned player, I find it challenging to locate the screens I need. I had to Google where the staff responsibilities screen is, for instance.
This wasted precious time, which, frankly, I really can’t spare, when I am trying to fit in an FM session around the chaos that is modern life. There were other screens I couldn’t find easily, and it became a chore to attempt to play the game. It didn’t seem as fun or exciting to me as previous FM games.
Some in the FM community have said this game is less complicated and easier to use for newbies. I am not sure I subscribe to that theory. I can’t speak from a newbie point of view, but I would say that it is difficult to negotiate.
The light at the end of the tunnel
The biggest thing for me was that I started a number of saves, and I didn’t get the same excitement as previous editions of the game. I must have tried four or five different saves where I did six months or even a season, but I wasn’t getting any buzz from the game.
However, I finally found a save that started giving me that old feeling of excitement. Ironically, the save came from one of the tactic testing articles, where I created my own tactic.
After not playing the game that much, I thought I would give it a go after I wrote the article. Obviously, I had been on holiday for the first season, but started playing it properly in the second season.
The game is now in January 2029, and I have finally started getting a touch of that excitement from the old editions. It is a slightly diluted excitement, but it’s a start.
When I first started playing the game, I felt like I didn’t want to play it, which is a problem for someone who writes for an FM site. However, I am optimistic that the excitement could grow the more I play the game.
Now I have played the game for over 100 hours, and I can see what SI were trying to do. I actually like the UI’s visuals. I don’t mind the tiles.
For those struggling to get into it, play the game and persevere; you may start enjoying it. You may just be thinking about it when you are not playing the game, which only happens when you are immersed in the game. This is a sign that FM26 has potential and could well be a step in the right direction.
Is FM26 perfect? Not by any distance. Is the current user UI annoying? For me, yes! However, FM26 is almost a test, since it uses a new game engine. It was always going to be a case of trial and error.
It may not be the best of starts for the new era of FM, but that’s all it is, a start. In the future, I can see the game getting better and becoming more immersive once again. Hopefully, that full FM excitement will return either with playing more of FM26
