Soccer Manager 2018, together with its previous versions, is football manager game that clearly was inspired by the classic Championship Manager games, but in fact is kind of hybrid between the PC football managers and online ones. We can manage teams from quite few teams from around the world, although the game has some strange limitations (if you choose country from Europe then all other continents becomes blocked).
While the basic skill value is clearly defined in the game (between 1 and 100) each player has numerous skills split into technical, mental and physical. Also the values are put together to form attacking and defending skills, group into subvalues, which would be quite impressive, although it is simply is too much data that has no clear meaning in the game.
Match presentation is very similar to Championship Manager 4 with round objects representing the players, but there are some options missing to cut the game only to the interesting bits (you can only speed up the game). Match statistics are very limited (goals, assists, cards, etc), so it is hard to spot weak points of our team. But fortunately it does not really matter since match engine is heavily relying on random elements and often it is hard to understand why you win or lose.
This game is technically free, but of course creators use micropayments as a method of making money on it, but as it usually are this method could put off some players from committing to Soccer Manager, especially since the payments are used to increase your bank balance, improve morale of your players, getting access to locked parts of the game, etc. Interesting concept, but riddled with weak points and flaws.
