Football Manager 2024 Touch Review (Switch eShop)

Football Manager is an obsession for a rather large demographic each year, the sort of game that is nibbling away at the back of your mind when you're supposed to work, do taxes, or just be a grown-up. For some of us the obsession dates back to its Championship Manager days in the early/mid-1990s, and the core of manipulating a massive spreadsheet is still here. That said, the series has evolved a lot in terms of depth and design, with Sports Interactive also finding ways to take the game from its full-fat home on PC to various platforms and formats. For Switch, this means Football Manager 2024 Touch — as opposed to the 'Console' version on PlayStation and Xbox — the iteration of the game that simplifies some areas and strives to retain depth to hook players, all while being accessible on a touch screen.

This year is an interesting entry for another reason; it's an end of an era. As an annual series, it has sometimes been accused of not advancing or changing enough each year, so Sports Interactive opted to change less in this entry with a true sequel/step forward due next year. In a quirky turn of events, however, that approach of simply polishing the heck out of last year's game — while fixing some oddities and irritations — has made this year's PC entry arguably the best in years. Who knew that devoting enough time to one product could make it better?

The game's in a good place, then, and that does also apply to Touch on Switch. That said, this isn't the definitive or best way to play for technical and hardware reasons — the Switch touchscreen and general performance can't match a very expensive mobile phone or tablet, and the physical controls are still rather clumsy. If you're unfamiliar with the controller options, it'll take time to figure things out; this is a game where sub-menus often have sub-menus, and navigating around often necessitates some awkward maneuvering. It does work, just be prepared to fight the controls if this is your first entry on the Switch.

Football Manager Touch has been in the suite of FM titles for a little while, though, and it does feel like the developers have been honing it nicely alongside the core PC experience. It's actually surprising how much depth makes the cut — tactically you can still go to town in various areas, getting quite intricate with your line-up's strategies. Adjustments during matches are decent, too, though detailed team talks and shouts from the touchline are notably reduced in potency. Overall, though, when trying to do your best Jürgen Klopp impression, you can dabble with your gegenpress until your significant other notifies you that they think a divorce is in order.

Other simplifications are an interesting change, easing the sting for those who feel they're losing a degree of control from other versions. For example, Touch strips away a lot of player engagement and conversations, so you have less of a sense of each individual's personality. While you don't get to man-manage to the same degree, you instead set philosophies and principles to which the squad is supposed to strive. Areas like Training are also simpler, perhaps too much so, but this version is more about building a team and strategy to conquer the league in a reasonable amount of time. Touch maintains the detail in areas like Tactics and Recruitment to that end, stripping away other aspects of the day-to-day management instead.

In general, it is a good dip-in-and-play game, too, even if there's the underlying sense that it's working the Switch hard. On setup, you can add a reasonable number of leagues and data and sacrifice speed, but even with a 2.5 (out of 5) speed rating in our main save, we found the tempo of the game fine. It's far quicker than Sid Meier's Civilization VI on Switch, for example, so once you've done the legwork with your club you'll be rattling through matches quite nicely.

As for those matches, the famously old-gen but still oddly immersive match engine is still here, and the Switch does an okay job with it. It's smooth enough to enjoy what's happening, you'll just need to forgive some rough edges to the visuals. But heck, it's easy to not care too much about how it looks as you ponder why your Pressing Forward isn't, well, pressing enough for your liking. We also had a game where two goalkeepers got injured in the same match, and then the post-match media questioned why we had an outfield player in goal for the last 10 minutes; oddities like that can happen, known among players as 'getting FM'd.'

Overall, the experience holds up well on Nintendo's system; though the controls need to be grappled with and there are occasional loading times to sit through, it feels like a solid iteration. Add to that the fact it's a full Touch experience, including interesting options for 'real world' databases when you start a career, or even short management challenge scenarios to tackle, and what we have is a very good version of the game on the hybrid system.