my only regret in life is that i tried to give this abomination an honest chance so i couldnt refund it

trash

Worst fm created. The ui is buggy and bad. Also the players just dont score. Moving back to fm24 thanks for a bad game. I feel scammed.

TL;DR - Abandon hope all ye who purchase here. No, this is not an upgrade from FM24 (nor FM23, nor FM22, nor FM21 tbh). Don't buy this game unless you're being held at gunpoint. Then refund it.

Let's break this down (I've got 135ish hours into the game at the time of reviewing, Plus 1000s of hours into previous games)

The good:
- A marginal upgrade to the in-match graphics.
- The addition of the real names to competitions (something that could be modded since at least FM12 when I started playing, so not really an upgrade)

The neutral:
- The in-game engine has not changed despite the reskin. All that is present now is that you can better see the nonsense that occurs in-match e.g. players still attempt to shoot from roughly 5 degree angles instead of crossing to a central player. This has been an issue with the game logic for over a decade.

The bad (and oh dear, there is so much bad. Let's breakdown how much worse this game is to previous editions):
- The UI is astonishingly bad. Let's be clear here: they took two whole years to take a functional UI and make it so bad that the SI forums are littered with people trying to find workarounds for simple functions (search "how do I create friendly matches for U21 teams" if you want to claw your eyes out in frustration)
- There is still an extraordinary backend bias towards some teams and their players (and thus the reverse against their opponents). The exceptional scouting of FM of old departed years ago and we've been fighting an uphill battle against the SI shills ever since.
- If you care about anything more than shots, possession or corners, then the in-match data set will make you cry. That's all you get. Care about, for instance, chances created? You have to wait until the match is over.
- I genuinely thought that the 'shouts' feature had been abolished. Nope, it's just harder to find AND use.
- Opposition instructions for player can only be set before a match for "anticipated lineup", so if a player is selected that falls outside that ambiguous parameter then you'll have to set it yourself.
- Related to the above: in-match opposition instructions are a weird little button that you have to fumble around to find like a blind man looking for Babylon.
- In-match, should a sub be made by your opponent, it will 9 times out of 10 not be reflected in the opposition instructions section anyway so I hope you remembered the name from the 2 second pop up that occurred in-game.
- Online saves are capped so that even in a single team save, you will run out of space before the end of a single season. Have SI run out of Sega money for cloud saves? Or are they pocketing the money for future game failures? Who is to say? Not I, a humble acolyte and football devotee. I care only for the game, and there is no game here.
- Set pieces are fundamentally broken. Throughout an entire season as Arsenal, I’ve scored two goals from corners (and neither were directly, they came from unforced errors after the fact), nobody has scored one against me (nor in other games). Nobody in the entire league has scored a free kick, which is unsurprising when I note that in my own matches no free kicks are ever shot at the goal, they’re always laid off to a nearby player.

There are more problems but right now I can't recall them. The above represents a good cross section of the worst of them.

All in all, this game is a disgrace. SI should refund the lot of us and spend a good long time sitting in the corner alone thinking about what they've done (or rather, spent 2 years not doing).