Lords of Football Review

Giving your players what they want means they might eventually become addicted and start acting irrationally. Some will start missing practice, perform poorly in training, harass the fans or play selfishly during a match. To remedy this, you have to drag your players to rehab and not allow them to party too much during the evenings, eventually restoring their mental state. Again, it’s more busy work for the player and there is not much fun to be had nurturing your alcoholics back into society.

By keeping the players happy and performing, the moral improves and can give apparent boosts for the match ahead. Now we enter the second phase of the game – an actual match. Here things look just as dreary and disappointing as before. Having set the basic tactics and selected your lineup (nothing more complex than in FIFA or PES), you watch the squad arrive on the pitch and begin play. While matches can be fast forwarded, you’re leaving the results to chance as the game doesn’t have a particularly good simulation engine. Instead, you can manually take control of the action by issuing direct player commands – that is, not controlling them but rather yelling from the sidelines to do something specific. You can pause the match at any time to issue these commands, and most players will be able to abuse the AI fairly quickly by manually directing shots, runs, and passes on their way to goal. Other than a few times your AI team refuses to perform the action or the poor physics engine throws a glitch, winning matches is an easy but lengthy and boring process.

As the match is complete, you’re back to the town stage, as a new morning dawns. And that’s pretty much the gist of the experience – the town phase simulated in one day covers the entire time between your matches, so there’s a limited amount of variety to be had. You watch the players gradually improve over the season, have their mental breakdowns and skip training, go out on the town, and proceed to the next match. Play the match, then rinse and repeat. The ultimate goal is winning leagues and Euro titles, but in essence the game is endless as you can keep going for any number of seasons.

Regardless of what country, league, or team you select, the town is the same, with similar facilities and visuals. The only difficulty in the game comes from the skill of your squad, but that’s often easily mitigated by using and abusing direct orders during matches. Stadiums also look rather similar and underwhelming, while player models are awkward and not very well animated. Sound design is minimal.

All in all, this is a low budget title that feels shallow in almost every aspect. While Lords of Football may have had an interesting idea, it doesn’t mean it could ever be translated to a worthwhile gaming experience. Like a stripped down version of FM meets The Sims, the game comes up short in all areas; from basic gameplay design and mechanics to presentation and total lack of variety. Had this been priced lower, there might be something worth a look for those extremely interested in the idea of how footballers spend their social time. But at $30, you could do so, so much better – get The Sims 3 or a real football management title on sale.