Football Drama

The game Football Manager is essentially a database and lots of random numbers to update the data. The fun comes from how it captures your imagination and how you see your decisions reflected in the match engine. I guess these days the match engine does have fancy visuals, but back in the day, it was pretty much in your imagination.

Several years ago, to practice programming, I made a simple football manager game; so it was a basic UI and some random numbers, but it wasn’t that exciting or complex. I couldn’t really come up with something that seemed feasible and fun, but sometimes I’ve kept my eye out for inspiration. I found a YouTube video of a developer showing off his match engine and it seemed really cool, and he said it would become a released game called Football Drama, so I thought one day I would buy it and see how it turns out.

Football Drama ignores a lot of aspects that you would assume to be in a football game. So you never see your individual players, you don’t have any names, so have no direct interaction with them, and can’t see any personal stats; top scorers lists etc. Your team has some overall attributes that can be tweaked before a game by choosing a training option, and can be modified in game by playing a tactic “card”.

You are shown which team has the possession and which area of the field the ball currently is in, then you choose an option between “control” or “risky”. You don’t really understand how the mechanics of the game work, but the risky option increases your “stress” level and when this reaches around 50% then you are prevented from using the risky option. Control lowers the “stress” level, but it doesn’t move the ball forward when in possession. After each choice, your Pressing, Focus and Surprise levels are changed.

When the ball reaches the edge of the area, you need to choose the risky option to attempt to put the ball in the area, but if it goes out wide, you will need to choose risky again. You can score goals from the control option (which turns into “Team”) but it seems you have a better chance doing the risky option “Solo”. So you need a bit of buffer on the “stress” level in order to score goals.

Choosing “control” on the edge of the area is beneficial, because you do have a good chance of being awarded a Free Kick, and I reckon I got most of my goals this way.

I thought the games tended to be low-scoring because the mechanics led to a lot of back-and-forth between the teams. You get near the area, then turn-over possession. I also saw an unrealistic number of shots hit the post or crossbar.

You only see the 2D visuals of goal-scoring chances, so that fancy match engine I saw the developer show-off isn’t put to great use. Maybe it didn’t create realistic or interesting scenarios, so he used it for major highlights only.

Since there are 10 teams in the league, the game consists of an 18 game season, and there are dialogue sections in-between for the story. Since it is really a story-based game, then you only play a single season. I thought the story wasn’t well explained and I did wonder if there were references I wasn’t picking up on, because there were some strange sentences at times. The characters have silly names and I understood a few of these like “Splatter” referring to ex-FIFA President Sepp Blatter.

Your choices have an impact on your relationship with the characters, and affect your Karma and Chaos levels. I assume this has some bearing on the story.

I liked the overall art style and colour scheme. This kind of game doesn’t need fancy graphics but it’s nice that they have put some effort into the aesthetic.

I encountered a few possible bugs. I saw a few goals that were clearly offside, but maybe this is intentional because that happens in real life without the (VAR) video assistance. I saw a Penalty that was taken as a free-kick outside the area. At Week 15, I was given a halfway summary, which obviously should have been after Week 9.

Since the focus is supposed to be the story, and I didn’t really care for the story; I’m really judging this on the gameplay during the matches - and that is pretty boring. I think it is a shame that you don’t see player names because at least you could get excited by individual performances. I really wanted to like this game, but it’s just too bland.