➤ We Are Football: the review of the new football manager 🎮

Can you really be able to compete with Football Manager? The question must also have been posed by the members of Winning Streak Games before embarking on the realization of We Are Football, a football manager that is destined to arrive in these days in a market dominated by the Sports Interactive milestone.

Even if the name of the development team tells you little, know that in reality behind Winning Streak Games there are some veterans of the sector, intending, as we are about to see, to combine their proposal with that of Football Manager, rather than to make a real competition to the old colossus.

Before moving on to We Are Football review, remember that the name of Gerald Köhler, creator of the old On The Ball series and key figure in the creation of the first FIFA Managers, is at the helm of the project. Having buried the franchise created by Electronic Arts for several years now, the time has come for Köhler to return to work in the niche of managerial dedicated to football.

Modes and teams

We Are Football: the review of the new football manager

Once the short is completed tutorial destined to show the basics of We Are Football, the time has come to choose how to live your own managerial adventure. The options that are made available concern the possibility of playing alone or together with another person in hotseat mode, after having each chosen their own team. From this point of view We Are Football decides to immediately embrace the philosophy already adopted a few years ago by EA Sports with FIFA, proposing in addition to the men's championships also the women's ones. The difference in the game dynamics, as far as we could see, is minimal, but the fact remains that We Are Football is the first manager to propose such an alternative.

Whether you choose men's or women's teams, what is totally missing are the licenses of clubs, leagues and real footballers, in the absence of which the members of Winning Streak Games had to come up with fictitious names with which to fill the game. The teams are easily recognizable thanks to their colors and some cute pun that recalls the real counterpart, such as Sirtaki Verona instead of Hellas Verona or Giovin Torino for Juventus.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the players present. The composition of the roses is in fact completely random and therefore does not allow us to recognize the stars of the real world panorama in any way. By selecting Napoli, for example, we found ourselves a squad made up mostly of Spanish players only, accompanied by two Argentines. Over time we end up becoming fond of the players we find in We Are Football, but it is clear that a starting situation in which we are unable to recognize in any way the Koulibaly or the Mertens on duty can inevitably end up subtracting interest in this. title.

Try to remedy these shortcomings the editor present within the package, thanks to which players can modify and create the game elements to their liking. The hope is of course that a We Are Football community will be formed that will take on this work as it happens in other similar cases, even if such a thing is not at all obvious.

Gameplay

The idea behind the gameplay of We Are Football can be summed up in the way of saying "easy to learn, difficult to master". For what is the system set up by Winning Streak Games, the most suitable competitor is perhaps Football Manager Touch, or the simplified version of FM that Sports Interactive has been putting into circulation for a few years. The game is played through shifts that go from week to week, allowing the player to plan the activities that will be carried out by the staff over the next seven days. For example, we can arrange a meeting with a sponsor or another team to buy a player, so that the negotiation is then made when the passing of days arrives at the appointment.

In general, the bargaining phases are limited to a few elements such as the duration of the contract, the basic amount and any bonuses. We must say that, once you understand how the CPU thinks, the most savvy player will have no difficulty in being able to bring the figures towards more convenient conditions for their club.

Among the various activities to plan there are also the workouts. As well as all aspects of We Are Football, we can accept the suggestions of the coaching staff, which we can then modify to our liking. The activities available are actually different, so you must always be careful not to overdo the workloads between one game and another, preferring athletic preparation in the initial phase of the season. The growth of the players takes place through a series of levels, highlighted on the screen with a star representation. In addition to the generic activity, we can choose any focuses to which to dedicate the members of our team, possibly spending our own action points to give a small bonus to a particularly promising young player or to a key member of the squad. The action points are obtained as our coach also grows and improves and are obviously limited: for this reason they must be spent reflecting properly on their choices.

The match

The phase preceding the match looks similar to what Football Manager fans already know. Before entering the field, you can in fact choose to make a speech of encouragement to your players, intended for example to ensure that they adhere more scrupulously to the tactics or to raise their morale. In a similar way, at the intermission we can tell them what we think of the first forty-five minutes played, with a group talk or by taking one of the elements of the opening eleven individually to praise or reprimand him.

The game is played through a system a salient phases, which slows down the running of the stopwatch when a dangerous action occurs. In this phase the representation activates a series of animations in 2D, in which the trajectory of the ball and the action performed by the player who controls it is constantly shown, up to the conclusion on the net or another type of epilogue of the action. Overall, the experience is revealed also in this case rather immediate, however leaving the player the possibility to set tactical elements such as the attitude on the pitch, the propensity to fouls and the frequency of pressing.

As it is set up, the gameplay of We Are Football allows you to carry out the tasks as a coach quite quickly, offering, as we have seen, already packaged solutions to which we can still choose to make changes by going into more detail. Potentially, therefore, it is possible to play entire seasons even within a few hours of play. A final note regarding the texts, they are entirely translated into Spanish.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Sistema operativo: Windows 10 - 64-Bit
CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3,20 GHz
RAM: 16 GB
Video card: NVIDIA GTX 970

Minimum requirements

Sistema operativo: Windows 7, 8, 10 a 64 bit
CPU: Intel or AMD Athlon with at least 2.6 GHz
RAM: 4 GB
Video card: AMD or NVIDIA with at least 1GB VRAM
Disk space: 2 GB

Recommended Requirements

Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit
CPU: Intel or AMD Athlon with at least 3.3 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
Video card: AMD or NVIDIA with at least 2GB VRAM
Disk space: 2 GB

Comment

Digital Delivery Steam Price 34,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

6.0

Readers (3)

7.5

Your vote

We conclude the We Are Football review with an overall appreciation for the work done by Winning Streak Games, deserving of sufficiency also in light of the fact that it is an absolute debut. In light of what has been written so far, the main shortcoming is the absence of elements attributable to real footballers, which ends up making We Are Football lose part of its potential appeal. Even in the absence of official licenses, a little more could have been done from this point of view. Clearly, We Are Football is intended for those looking for a more immediate and essential experience than the detailed dynamics of Football Manager.