Reviews

I felt it was about time I reviewed another football management game, so I decided to look at On the Bench by Cult.

The game's name would make you think you're a player trying to work his way into the first team of a struggling Football League club, but it is just a management game. Here you select one of 88 clubs over four divisions to manage, no matter who you select you will start in Division 4. You can freely change the name of any of the teams. For curiosity's sake, for the purpose of this review I chose to manage Shrewsbury Town.

The very first thing you do as a manager is increase the capacity of your ground at a cost of £100 per person, which I find rather useless as you don't even know what your capacity is in the first place nor do they give it and you may end up overdoing it. So I just went 10 extra spectators and moved on.

So to the menu now and there are a good number of options to choose from here. You can view your squad to make changes to the starting 11, sell players or edit names. You can take training and improve your defence, midfield, attack, reserves or all, this can only be done once per week. You can view the league table and your match fixtures. There's the status page which displays lots of things, including your cash balance, wage bill, it's where your ground capacity is after all, the disciplinary points of your players tallying up their yellow and red cards, your league records such as highest win, biggest defeat, leading scorer and highest home and away attendance, and the appearance records of your players. You can go to your scouts and assign him to watch either a particular player from one team or all of the team. You can view the scorers list which takes ages to load. You can make an enquiry for a player and they'll give you a price in which you can purchase him. And you can view the FA Cup fixtures as well. When you're happy with everything you can play your next match. Such a lot of options in one game, even though most of them you will never use anyway.

The first three weeks are pre-season training which allows you to improve your team either by training or by transfers. So now it's the first league match of the season and we have a home game against Torquay United. The game screen displays your squad, your team ratings, in my case 30 for defence and 25 for midfield and attack, the league positions of the two teams which will read 11th for both at the first game but moving on it may read 13th for us and 4th for Swansea City for instance. There's the score and the game clock as well. So there's no pitch unlike British Super League and no commentary apart from GOAL which appears when a team scores, in this case Barnes scored for us after three minutes. I shouldn't complain about the lack of these as most management games had neither of these anyway. It displays a number beside a player if they scored, in my case Barnes, and a letter for a card, like B for booked like Clarke and Hamilton were. Pressing S allows you to make your one subtitution, here you enter the number of the player you'd like to take off and then choose a position for your sub to play, either D, M or A. In the end we threw away a one-goal lead and lost 2-1, and I am quite annoyed at my players.

And that's all there is to On the Bench. Quite honestly there isn't much to this game except there are a number of options to use that can keep you intrigued though perhaps not for the long run. But for any football management fans out there is could provide you some joy. Speaking of joy I plowed through the game with my emulator sped up and I managed to win my next four matches. I guess it's a game you'll enjoy as long as you're winning.

This is largely just another of those tedious, snorefest football management game but you don't even know which position the players are so squad selection is random. That's just poor and amateurish and that ultimately swayed my decision to give this a 1 rather than a 2.