Division Two

Championship Manager: All-Stars is a soccer management game. Just like Football Manager or Top Eleven, the game puts you in charge of a soccer team, and you have to use your tactical skills to take it to the top of the league, survive, and win tournaments.

Online and free to play

This isn’t the follow up to Championship Manager 15, but a free to play, mainly online alternative. Square Enix promise Championship Manager 16 is on the way.

Championship Manager: All-Stars has four modes. There’s All Star, which is the conventional version where you play full seasons, with league and cup competitions.

Survival mode gives you three ‘lives’ and lets you see how many games you can play without losing – every loss loses you a life. Adding to the challenge, the game obliges you to choose from players it proposes. You have to do your best with what you can choose from, making the most balanced team possible.

In Tournament mode you play in various competitions, using your All-Stars team. Like Survival mode, it’s played online with other managers from around the world. All-Star mode is offline, as is the last mode, World Tour, which sees you take on the most famous teams from around the globe. You can chat with other players when online.

The beautiful game?

The gameplay will be familiar to anyone who has played a soccer management game before. In Championship Manager: All-Stars you start with a randomly created team, featuring one ‘star’ player, who will no doubt become who you build your team around.

You have to train your team, buy and sell players, choose match tactics, and so on. But it’s not very deep, and even advanced tactics for games are pretty shallow compared to other soccer management games. There’s a market for buying and selling players, and you can use in-game cash and optional micropayments to get the team you want.

While the game has all the statistics you might want, the presentation of matches is pretty basic, just showing possession and basic commentary on the game. It’s functional, but a more graphical approach would have been nice.

Mid-table

Championship Manager: All-Stars is a competent soccer management game, but lacks the visual flair of other games like FIFA Ultimate Team. For fans of Square Enix’s Championship Manager series, this may feel like a disappointing stopgap between Championship Manager 15 and 16.