Giant Killers

The Good
see main review below

The Bad
see main review below

The Bottom Line
If you've loved Championship Manager and their ilk on any system you care to name, then you would be right in expecting a football management game for the Dreamcast that is worthy of this systems' awesome ability to entertain. Unfortunately, Giant Killers looks like it was coded in 1985. As management sims go, this has the least likely looking, and most maddeningly unsatisfying payoff, ever (perhaps) devised.

Management sims are a rare breed of game where the graphics and usual accoutrements you automatically expect of other games, are not supposed to matter. Thing is though - they do matter. Simple text only games died out for good reason decades ago and thought this one features 'scrolling text' (ooooerhhhh!) during matches, it struggles to look even passable amongst all other management sims that have been created for consoles since. Post the most recent crop of playable, deeply involving and quite beautifully animated console sims (LMA and their like), this one looks and feels like it belongs in a museum - out there with Donkey Kong and Scramble!

Should I go through the game play and options with you? God, if I must, to fill some required space, then I must. But trust me - it will be as tedious for you to read how creaky and cob-webbed this game is, as it was for me to play the damn thing. I'll concentrate instead I believe on describing why, in just one more paragraph, this game is such a lame duck. From there, perhaps you can make up your own mind.

Lets get to the guts of any football management sim then: the matches. Training players, spending money on transfers and choosing tactics: Blind Freddy can do that in any sim created. Giant Killers, too, has all the usual options and graphical introduction screens for each of these options. And they don't look half bad. In fact, the whole game (everywhere but where it most counts) has a nice look to it and is somewhat contemporary. But what really sells these sims is how the match, when actually played, is displayed to the player and how that involves them after their often hours of pre-preparation. In GK, a player can choose how much detail they want reported to them. There are NO graphic representations of players whatsoever, not even little coloured dots running around a green coloured square. Instead, even on the highest detail setting, the commentary never varies from a too-quickly scrolling list of fouls, missed shots and eventually, of course, goals scored. Text - all text! It is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely boring to involve yourself in, and the equivalent of shooting a dud bullet: all that build-up and then…pffffttttttt! No payoff. I have played mobile phone management sims in fact that look better than this, and were more involving.

Even in 2001, this game played like something that had been kept around for 10 years after its first coding (I suspect that’s exactly what the Developers did!). Now, its nothing more than a curio, and a rather boring one at that. Competently handled, but simply outclassed in playability and interest by every other management sim I have ever played.

4/10