With FM27, Sports Interactive has gone back to the tactics board in an attempt to deliver a more familiar, FM-like experience.

FM27 feels like Football Manager again. That was my takeaway after spending five hours with a pre-release version of the game at the Sports Interactive HQ last week.

When it comes to Football Manager, I would put myself firmly into the ‘hardcore’ player category, having spent thousands and thousands of hours “playing” iterations of the immersive football management experience. I say playing, “being consumed by” is more accurate. But that all changed when FM26 launched.

Despite the year-long delay, FM26 was almost unrecognisable from what I understand Football Manager to be. The numerous bugs and redesigned, unfamiliar interface didn’t help, but what really turned me off for good was the absolute disaster that was navigation. A lot of this stuff has been covered extensively already, but basically, the information you didn’t want was right there, and the information you did want was often hidden in places that took so long to get to that you forgot what you were looking for in the first place.

Thankfully though, or unfortunately for me and my social life, Sports Interactive has gone back to basics with FM27, and has struck a much better balance between things players want to find, being easy to navigate to, while also having the much-maligned “tiles” giving you information in a short, concise way.

Return to form

Navigating FM27 is much like navigating any Football Manager title before FM26; it feels like Football Manager should. Hyperlinked players, clubs, leagues, nations and more go exactly where you’d expect them to go, heat maps and cup draws have returned, the drop-down menus are back, and although the much-maligned information tiles do pop up from time to time, they have clearly put a lot more thought into what are the few cases where a tile is needed, with most information either available in your inbox or you can edit elements within pages to show the information you’d like. I could go on and on about all of the little improvements in this area, but it really is night and day compared to FM26.

It's not perfect, mind you. You still can't fully navigate the world once you've begun the matchday sequence, for example. Instead, clicking on a player or team in this scenario just opens up the information within a tile that only shows some of the information you want, and you just go around and around stuck with the info in that tile. But, compared to FM26, FM27 is very, very close to what most Football Manager veterans would recognise. Regardless of the new features in FM27, which include some major ones, the improved navigation and feel of the game are by far the biggest positive change compared to last year.

One of those new features is the new Tactical Familiarity section, which has the potential to change the way you approach a new save in a significant way. The idea is that the more complex a tactic you decide to use, the longer your squad will take to become familiar with that tactic. Both the squad and each individual player will have a tactical familiarity rating, and some players will adapt more easily and quickly than others, depending on their attributes.

This means, if you come into a club that played possession-based football in a 4-3-3 formation, and your chosen tactic is a 3-4-3, it will take much longer than in previous Football Manager titles for your players to get used to that change. Fitting into this neatly is the fact that training has been reworked around this, to prioritise tactical familiarity and how to win the next game, rather than improving individual players, to bring it more in line with what we see in real life.

Suddenly, when playing FM27 for the first time, I felt how Ruben Amorim must have felt at Manchester United. Do I persist with this formation and tactics when my players clearly don’t understand them and are playing a longer-term game, or do I adapt to something the players are more familiar with and get some results on the board? These are things you’ll be wrestling with on FM27, and it definitely shakes things up a bit.

There have been a lot of changes to the match engine, too, in how players move, how fast they run, and how far they can run, with stamina and physical fitness now more important than ever, particularly late in games. There's also a new tactical option that lets you tell your attacking players exactly which area of the box they should attack.

Having only played the game for five hours or so, it's difficult for me to properly review these changes, and I'll need to test the match engine over a few seasons, at least, to give my full thoughts, but these are all positive changes that I can't wait to try out properly.

Tweaking the formula

Something I tried out quite a bit during my time with FM27, though, was the new Tweaks feature, which lets players make small tactical tweaks from the touchline without going into the full tactics menu. When this feature was first explained to me, I assumed it was designed with beginners in mind, because the full-fat tactical menu can be overwhelming, and the Tweaks drop-down menu is simple and concise, giving clear information about exactly how each Tweak will change your team's tactics. But, honestly, I think Tweaks is a good addition for FM veterans too.

I'm a tinkerer, so whenever I see something I want to change, tactics-wise, in a match scenario, I often go into the tactics screen mid-match and intend to make just a small change, but often end up making multiple, more complex tactical changes, because having all the options there is pretty tempting; I just can't help myself. But with Tweaks, you can make small but important tactical changes with the click of a button from the touchline, which is more realistic and happens in football all the time, just without the click part.

If you're defending a lead, you can click "Shut Up Shop", for example, which will make all the tactical changes needed to try to preserve it. Or, on the other side of the coin, clicking "Throw the Kitchen Sink" will make your team ultra-attacking, with multiple instructions at the touch of a button. Again, more testing is needed, but my initial impressions were positive, despite being pessimistic to begin with.

And there are the visuals, which have taken another step up from FM26, with improved crowds, better player models, more fluid animations, more in-depth cutscenes, more accurate stadiums, and they've even made improvements to 2D Classic, which is a big deal for me, as someone who continues to play in that camera.

So, after spending five hours with FM27, I already know that I like it more than FM26. It feels like Football Manager should, and the fewer but impactful new features complement the experience rather than overshadow it.

With FM26, Sports Interactive tried to reinvent Football Manager when they didn't need to. But with FM27, I'm pleased to say that Sports Interactive seems to have recognised that, listened, reverted and concentrated instead on what they do best, with few incremental tweaks to the familiar formula we all know and love. It's one step back, but two huge steps forward.

I can't wait to play more FM27, and that's exactly what I was hoping for.