Football Manager 2023 Review (Geowii)
TL:DR
If you play FM a lot - its worth getting (FM continues to be one of the best value games out there), but if you only get <100 hours a year out of the game, don't bother. It is a very small change to FM 22, and half of the new features are poorly implemented/don't add anything. If they work at all.
If you haven't bought an FM since 2019, then this will be a nice upgrade.
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OK, So it's FM, you will get your money's worth. But FM23 is not a good vintage. I have given it a thumbs up - because of the value it offers, but it is a very reluctant thumbs up.
I got over 1000 hours out of FM 22, and felt that was a poor year. Initial reaction (30 hours of beta) is this year is worse still (by worse i mean fewer changes and less improvements on the previous years).
Some of the new features are nice , i like the fan info/expectations, i quite like the end of season manager timeline (which i wasn't expecting to), but neither of these are game changing. However, that's about where the good ends for the new features.
The scouting changes are clunky, and make it feel more awkward to set up (and also don't work some of the time, but i will put this down to actual bugs in the beta, rather than design, and hope i am right). Also the old system still is there for some competitions for some reason, just to add to the confusion.
The squad planner is a good idea, but poorly implemented (and the layout for it is god awful - hopefully skins will help here). I keep just going back to the squad depth view as used in previous version, only it now takes me 3 more clicks to get there from my squad page.
Player traits are nearly impossible to see anymore, because SI choose to put them in the world's smallest box on the player screen for some reason - again skins may come to the rescue here.
In game changes/ match engine, improvements are noticeable, but small (you will loose the ball in midfield more often, and the AI won't wait until the 72nd minute to change their tactic against you any more), but overall feels very similar to FM22. I heard a lot about the game being harder - its not. As always with FM (and i don't say this as a bad thing) difficulty is down to the team you choose/ restrictions you give yourself.
For a game i know i will still play ~1000 hours of, i am disappointed. I knew the changes were small from the feature videos/release notes etc, however even those "new" features they have introduced in FM 23 are either poorly done and/or not very impactful on the game itself.
I understand why FM 21/22 were weak years, but i had hoped they would get their act together for FM23. However i was wrong,
As always, FM is fantastic value - it offers hundred of hours of replayability and is one of my favourite games, but this year really is just a glorified database update.