Another game from the Championship Manager series offered few new elements since they were trying to keep up with their biggest rival Football Manager. Most of them were rather marginal, f.e. set pieces planner, scouting network reports and ProZone analysis. But the biggest change was the match engine - for the first time Championship Manager was offering a 3D view on the match events, which was done with a lot of effort (using over 500 individual player animations), which would give a chance to watch the match like in TV.
Unfortunately in practice most of the changes were already done in other games, while the 3D match engine was full of glitches and not always gave good view on the action. But the biggest problem with the game was what must be good in football manager game - the match engine itself. While we had plenty of countries and teams to choose from, a lot of options while managing the club still the most important thing is the match engine, which actually failed in Championship Manager 2010. For example the injuries were far too frequent (often at least 1 in each game, sometimes even 4 or 5 in one team during single match). Another example were goals scored in first minute of the match - there were dozens of them each season. The interface was far from being user friendly (especially while selecting the team for the match), the scouting network did not worked as expected, the transfer negotiations were sometimes just weird - you could spend a lot of time on negotiations and at the end of them learn that the player was not interested in such move in first place. Another weird element were players available on free transfers - there are thousands of them and you can get loads of very good players for free, which kills the transfer market, because it is very hard to actually sell player since there are so many available for free.
Overall Championship Manager 2010 was step towards the standards set by Football Manager, but the improvements, including 3D match engine did not actually worked.
