Lords of Football: Review
Football today can rightfully be called the most popular sport on our planet. Tournaments of various levels – from competitions of yard teams to world championships – hundreds of thousands of boys dreaming about the fate of the second Pele or Maradona, millions and millions of dollars swirling around advertising, match tickets, betting, and even the football players themselves. Its own football subculture has long been formed, and not just one – some prefer to sort things out with fans of other teams with their fists, while others quietly and peacefully follow every mention of their favorite player, plastering the entire room with posters with images of their idol.
Video games have not been left out either – football simulators are perhaps the most common of sports sims. But almost all of them covered only one aspect of modern football – in fact, the actions themselves on the field. What happens outside of matches and training and what is now almost more noticeable than championships and championships, namely the relationship between players and clubs, scandals and gossip (let’s say thanks to the journalists and their readers, who are all more interesting in this than football as a sport) – all this remained behind the scenes.
Lords of Football designed to correct this shortcoming. A football manager enters the field, where the personal lives of athletes are given no less attention than their purely professional activities.
According to the Brazilian system
When meeting Lords of Football somehow a comparison with the series immediately arises The Sims. As practice shows, this is true – even purely external coincidences are everywhere: a familiar interface style with large icons, cartoonish characters who love to make faces, music and voice acting… In the same way, you need to monitor the needs and desires of your charges, trying in every possible way to improve their lives. Only, unlike The Sims, the goal for which you have to listen to the whims of the “sims” is quite tangible here: winning matches with other clubs.
We choose a team, a championship – and go ahead, conquer the heights of the football Olympus. The developers did not spend money on licensing, so all clubs and players LoF have fictitious names. But nothing prevents you from renaming them to your taste, thus taking the reins of Spartak or Barcelona.
As you know, the more difficult https://magicredcasino.uk/ it is in training, the easier it is in battle. It’s the same here: the team spends most of its playing time in grueling training. We, in the person of the coach, are free to choose what exactly this or that club member will do: in the sports town there is enough space for training – from a large field where basic training is carried out, to a fitness room and a room for studying tactical techniques. Thanks to these trainings, each football player improves his skills, including speed, strength, endurance, accuracy and several other parameters already familiar to everyone who has ever played football FIFA or PES. After distributing team members to training places, all that remains is to watch how the football players sweatily jump around the field until dark. However, nothing prevents you from finishing your workout early or, conversely, extending your classes until the morning. In the latter case, along with improving skills, expect an increase in fatigue and dissatisfaction – football stars have completely different plans for the evening.
The tactical editor allows you to quite flexibly customize your team’s game. The only pity is that the consequences of the changes are almost invisible.
These guys know how to relax and love it. Each player, in addition to the purely physical indicators mentioned above, has his own needs, without satisfying which any Ronaldinho over time, he loses interest in his sports career and turns into a useless hulk on the field. Some people prefer to dance with girls all night, others constantly hang out in casinos, many, like real football stars, cannot live without the attention of the public and the press. Our players live their personal lives in a small town, next to which the team’s base is located. This city has plenty of hot spots where you can have fun: a pub, a casino, a fan club, a disco, a radio station and a restaurant. Here you need to carefully monitor each athlete: one tries to get drunk into unconsciousness, the second squanders all his money on roulette, and the third is going to try all the dishes in the restaurant. Yes, meeting the needs of football players gives a certain advantage to their playing skills, but it can also lead to addiction, which can cause a training session or match to be disrupted. If you don’t follow, prepare for the consequences. The team’s best striker or goalkeeper, completely drunk in the morning, quietly stealing money from the locker room to pay off a gambling debt is not at all uncommon in Lords of Football.
You can also watch your team’s matches. It is even allowed to control the football players a little – not directly, but by indicating the general direction of movement, pass or shot at goal. Of course, changing tactical schemes and style (attacking or defensive) on the move, as well as substitutions, are present.
The whole game consists of these three stages – training, rest and meetings. And at first it even looks interesting and lively, but the further you move along the calendar, the more clearly you see that the gameplay LoF depressingly monotonous. Each week is as similar to the previous one as two peas in a pod, only the appearance of the city changes: in winter it is covered with snow, and in autumn – with leaves. The rest is “Groundhog Day”, nothing less.
Perhaps the whole point is that the developers were unable to correctly distribute priorities between looking after the “Sims” and football management. For a serious trainer simulator, there is a lot missing here: the set of training sessions is not rich (plus they are not all available immediately, but as you complete the tasks of the club president), the effect of them is completely unobvious, and little depends on changing tactics and direct control during a match. With the personal lives of the players, which was positioned as the main feature Lords of Football, the same problems – everything is done too schematically. There are enough buildings for entertainment only at first – after a while you notice that there is no variety here, and there is no particular need to interfere with night parties, making decisions for the players about how to have fun tonight. For what? It’s still impossible to understand why this particular football player acts so badly during the match. Everything seems to be described in detail in his personal card, but why he fails to deceive the defender during an attack this time – because of an innately poor ball possession, a high level of the opponent, or because he ate too much at dinner yesterday – is unclear.
There is a catastrophic lack of events that require the intervention of a coach to resolve the situation. The most that will happen in 24 hours here is a couple of messages that one of the players missed training or needs to recover after a difficult match. These problems are solved in two clicks, after which all that remains is to watch the methodically training football players. Considering that the players’ movements during classes consist of exactly one animation option, this spectacle looks completely sad. The situation is similar with gatherings in nightclubs and casinos – each day cannot be distinguished from the previous one, and they drag on here for so long that even the possibility of speeding up time does not help much.
As a result, most of the game time is spent watching an “exciting” series about how two dozen local craftsmen made a hundred passes during training, and then went to the city in a crowd, where they sat in a pub until the morning. Yes, another one of the defenders signed autographs for fans instead of practicing. In the next episode – the same thing, with minor variations.
It’s good that you can skip the matches themselves, trusting the outcome of the meeting to be determined by lot. Players sluggishly rolling the ball from one end of the field to another, terrible replays and the general low level of graphics do not in any way motivate to follow the process. There are few dangerous moments and goals scored, as in real football, but this is precisely the case when excessive realism only harms. Where are the colorful goals performed “through oneself” and masterful dribbles?? Celebrating a goal with special moves for each player? Commentator’s remarks during the hot moments of the meeting? Can’t wait.
The fun lasted until the morning. Even fatigue after a stormy night doesn’t stop street dancing lovers.
Lords of Football – a clear example of poor implementation of an interesting idea. An attempt to build your own football manager failed miserably: if you aim to compete with FIFA Manager, then you need to play according to the rules of a serious and meticulous simulator, and the part with the “sims” and their whims must then be completely thrown aside. Even better if the guys from Geniaware, on the contrary, they made a slightly inadequate, but more fun simulator of the personal life of a football player, where the matches themselves are not so important; Probably this is exactly what was expected from them. The developers could release a fun and memorable game with a football theme. Instead Lords of Football, barely having time to enter the field, he receives a red card.
Pros: the opportunity to create your own team with any players; the first two hours the trainer’s work is even interesting..
Cons: …but then everything slides into a dull routine; it is impossible to track how players’ activities affect the quality of their play; inconvenient interface; disgusting animation.
