Football, Tactics & Glory: Lothar likes it slow

Please do not tip over, but you will not see the legend Lothar Matthäus in the game except on the title screen. What does he want to tell us with the slightly hungover look and the warning finger? After a few hours with Football, Tactics & Glory, we think it should be a warning …

Are you expecting something towards FIFA and PES or are you looking for an alternative to Football Manager? Then Football, Tactics & Glory will fall flat for you. With this, the Ukrainian developer Creoteam created a headstrong fusion of role-playing and tactical tinkering. The game has been on the PC for a while, now the PS4 implementation follows.

After a very short tutorial, we find ourselves as a former professional on the coaching bench. We either create a team ourselves or choose a team from the existing leagues. There are different countries to choose from, but due to a lack of licenses, clubs and players only have fancy names and faces. Unlike on the PC, there is no way for the PS4 version to ensure realistic conditions using a patch. If you have a lot of time, you can edit everything by hand, from competitions to player names and jerseys.

However, we are whistling for the shine of the Bundesliga anyway and prefer to make our former district league club DJK Wanne-Eickel 1988 the future star in the European football sky. Without further ado, half-way authentic jerseys and logo are created, then a random group is given to the coach's hand.

We'll start in the specially renamed Oberliga. Instead of playing in a magnificent stadium, we play our home games on a football field with rotten park benches. Our team consists of amateurs in their late 20s, whose footballing fortunes are light years away from Ronaldo and Messi.

Every beginning is difficult …

Football, Tactics & Glory is turn-based. The playing field is divided into several rectangles. We can make up to three moves over these fields per round. For example, with the first we advance the ball-carrying kicker, with the second we play a pass to the striker and with the third we let the goalkeeper shoot at the goal. That sounds easy, but it is only the beginning.

Because the abilities of every single rumble footballer play as important a role as the right moves. Accuracy, passport, defense and control are presented as numerical values. With these, every action stands and falls on the field: If we want to use a defender to steal the game from the opposing striker, its defense value must be higher than the control value of the attacker.

Conversely, the striker's shot on goal is only likely to succeed if his accuracy is higher than the goalkeeper's defense. Said information determines the probability of success when an action is carried out. But that can also mean that, for example, a midfield strategist plays a pass into nothing despite a top score. Creoteam obviously wants to simulate that even the world's best kicker can have a bad day.

But there are other factors that affect the course of the game. Successful special actions, such as a special trick, create another move for the current round. Passes only arrive safely at the teammate when there is no opponent in between. The distance to the goal also influences the success of a shot. Pressing lowers the ability of the player under pressure. And so on.

… and everything after that too!

At this point, at the latest, we are missing extensive help that gives us a detailed understanding of the various game mechanics and functions. Unfortunately Creoteam only integrated texts and graphics that are sometimes easy and sometimes difficult to understand. Thus, only repeated reading and then trying out on the virtual green helps.

In the initial league games everything is going smoothly. Because our kickers get experience points after each game and thus get better and better, the other bar teams don't have any problems. With specializations, our boys receive, among other things, more XP per game or attract additional paying fans to the stadium. We quickly settle in second place in the table and have an eye on the climb.

In the cup, however, we are shown our limits. Even the first third division team is really tough for us because its players are simply better in all areas. Even if we get the ball to the opponent's penalty area, the keeper catches each of our shots with the cap. Sometimes the ball lands in the legs of the defenders standing in front of it. Conversely, the offensive midfielder hits us several things from a distance. So our cup ambitions already end in the second round with two claps. Nothing comes together on either the defensive or the offensive in either game.

Now we could commit better kickers during the next transfer period – if the money was available. Sponsors and spectators are flushing so little coal into the club's fund, especially at the beginning of their careers, that we can no longer pay our top performers. The completion of profitable side tasks, such as performing a hoax, fail because my players do not master this skill and also take forever to learn it in training. In the end, the only thing left is to sell the best players for a lot of money and to continue with newcomers, who hopefully will hit quickly.

Tactical masterpiece

It takes some time before there is a feeling of control and understanding on the virtual soccer field. Predictive planning is particularly important. Where can the computer go? What options do we have to stop his next turn? From which position do our attackers have the best chance of scoring? It takes patience, attention and knowledge of your own troops and your opponent to weigh all of this. Although Football, Tactics & Glory is much less complex than the Football Manager, here too comes work and then pleasure.

In addition to the single player career, there is also the possibility to compete against other players online or offline in the versus mode "Hot chair: a game", in which the controller is passed back and forth after each round. "Hot chair: tournament" works the same way, but offers the opportunity to experience a whole season or the knockout phase of a competition with a number of teams of your choice.

Audiovisually, Football, Tactics & Glory is very, very staid. The players have to make do with a handful of animations that are constantly repeated. Soundtrack and effects are even sparser. Navigating in the simple menus was more poorly adapted to the controller controls. Among other things, a constant change between digital cross and analog sticks is necessary, for example to switch back and forth between the squad and the tactical line-up. Many texts and symbols are very small even on a large display. In short: this game is not for aesthetes!