There is no specific storyline as is often the case with sports games. Instead, Football Manager Classic 2014 is rich with your own emergent squeaky bum times as you guide your team to cup finals, out of relegation zones and you take over national sides. For the less committed managers, the challenge mode has you taking on specific situations like a club amidst an injury crisis, go a season unbeaten or win silverware with a core of youth players. These are shorter, more intense affairs where you can forget about the club’s long term goals and just concentrate on the football.
Manager is controlled through the touch screen with your fingers acting as the mouse pointer. In theory, this is far better than navigating with the analogue stick or D-pad. Unfortunately, like many of my own game plans, it all goes out the window as soon as the game starts. The Vita’s screen size of five inches is nowhere near as big as your PC or laptop display and the result is reminiscent of viewing full websites on a smartphone. Not good. To alleviate this, the top menu bar can be hidden with a tap of the right shoulder button but text can be smaller than the fine print on a money lender’s advert and to make things worse, you’ll need fingers smaller than the Mariners transfer budget to click them.
Football Manager games are famed for being huge time sinks where seasons pass by over days and whole careers are lived in weeks. But that simply isn’t possible on this Vita version due to excruciatingly slow load times. Instead of speeding through seasons like Gareth Bale past defenders, you bumble along like Emile Heskey, waiting minutes to load a match and many more to play them. A lot of my time was also consumed by the undo button. I constantly selected the wrong buttons I didn’t mean to press, going back and forth between menus until it finally registered my desired input. I never felt I was ever in complete control. Football Manager Classic 2014 should be a perfect fit for the Vita as you can dip in and out with ease, but the long load times and clumsy interface mean you’ll barely complete one match in a commute.