We've already told you all about the new gameplay additions, including the First Touch system and the improved player animations, but now seems like as good a time as any to go into the deep career mode. Your aim is pretty simple: make yourself a 5-star manager in 15 seasons or less. How do you do that, you ask? Well, winning games is a good start, as is fulfilling the expectations of the teams owners. Don't forget, you don't need to stay with one team the whole time, and the game actually expects you to move around. Hopefully, you'll be moving up, rather than down.
When you start the career mode, the first thing you must do is choose a visage for your avatar. There are 20 people available, from older, strict-looking taskmasters to young, buttoned-down players' coaches. While the look you decide on doesn't actually affect the gameplay at all, I like to think that my players will shake in their cleats when I walk into the locker room, so I picked the sternest looking guy I could find, an older white man dressed in a suit and a tie that looks a little bit too tight. I might not know the first thing about managing a soccer team, but I know how to command the respect (and fear, which is just as important).
After choosing my look and creating a name, I had to pick a region and team to control. There are five different regions in the game, including the Americas and the United Kingdom teams (England, Scotland, etc.), as well as the Western European leagues like Italy's Serie A and Portugal's SuperLiga. I figured that I might as well start in the best league available to me, so I chose Germany's Bundesliga 2. As you might expect, all of the top teams in the league already had coaches, so I decide to start my career with the two-star Oberhausen team, mostly because I liked their four leaf clover logo.
Suddenly, a spinning newspaper flew towards the screen. The front page detailed news of my hiring, along with a quote that stated I was "thrilled" with my new position. The honeymoon was short-lived, however, when I received an email on my PDA from the team's board of directors. It said that they expected a top three finish this year, and I know that I had to come through, lest I lose my job after only a year.
