Championship Manager: Season 03/04 Review

Written by: Darren Cartledge Posted: 7th January 2008

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Review of the famous football management sim.

Championship Manager: Season 03/04 Details:

Goto Championship Manager: Season 03/04 Game Page

	Sports
	PC
	Sports Interactive
	Eidos

Out Now

N/A

It may seem a little excessive too release two versions of a game in the same year. None the less the good chaps at Eidos and Sports Interactive have given us a new version, in the hugely successful Championship Manager series.

Championship Manager Season 03/04 is essentially an update to CM4 that was released in March. All the updated player, team, league and competition stats from the current football season are included and some improvements to the game.

The biggest change from CM4 is the new training screen; everything you need has been placed on one screen and is available from a series of drop down menus, making it much easier to create an effective training schedule for your team. Effects of your training are also clearly visible from the player profile screen, which will help you plan your next training schedule, and improve weaknesses in your team.

Remember the 2D match engine that caused so much fuss? Well its still in the game, although it’s obvious Sports Interactive have been tweaking it. The 2D match view now shows which players are playing well and who is not. Misplaced passes, bad tackles and wasted shots are shown, giving you the opportunity to replace poor performing players with a fresh set of legs. This is a much needed improvement over the original version that usually led to the dots representing players merging into one big blur of colour.

As well as these improvements, the game also features a lot of minor tweaks ranging from media interaction to player to player relationships. Yes fining your players just for the fun of it now upsets the majority of your team. As always the game looks pretty similar to its predecessor, although the menus look cleaner and seem a little easier to navigate with most screens interlinked.

Overall Championship Manager Season 03/04 is pretty much the same game as CM4 and shouldn’t really have been released with a full price tag placed on it. However, if you didn’t buy CM4 you may want to consider picking up this game as you’ll enjoy practically an unlimited amount of play. The improvements do add some interesting options although you can’t help thinking they simply made it the game Championship Manager 4, should have been.