
My current favourite Skill Game is the Advanced Shooting Skill Challenge, where you get two and a half minutes to score as many goals as possible in a revolving range of scenarios.

The new Skill Games mode in FIFA 13 is exactly the sort of bite-size football challenge that makes smartphone treasures like Flick Kick Football so compulsive - except that it's built on one of the best football gameplay engines around, with all the pomp and connectivity you'd expect from a modern sports game. Through my long hours playing it, I often thought that Konami and EA Sports could learn a thing or two from its success and that of games like it. By breaking football down into short bursts of its most exciting and rewarding elements, like long-range shots and Hollywood passes, and tying that into a shallow but addictive management sim, New Star Soccer completely took over my free time. Weirdly though, this unexpected interloper wasn't PES 2013, although Konami's latest is a fantastic football game. It has become much easier to manage your team directly on the football field and make adjustments based on the situation.If you had told me at the start of the year that I would spend more time in 2012 playing a football game not made by EA Canada than I did in the grip of its imperious FIFA series, then I guess I would have told you there was more chance of Robin Van Persie signing for Manchester United.

I would like to draw your attention to the official licensing of FIFA, due to which there are more than 40 thousand virtual football players and real prototypes of world famous stadiums in the game. Contracts with football players, their trainings, pumping of their own football academy, expansion of the stadium - these and many other factors are the responsibility of the manager. It will be necessary to be responsible for all the nuances in the preparation of the team, from the composition and tactics to the financial component.


FIFA Manager 13 continues the tradition of this simulation game series in which you run your very own soccer club.
