Franchise Hockey Manager 3

A great game needs a great villan. In FHM 3 that great villian is Jarmo "The Butcher" Kekalainen, General Manager of the Columbus Blue Jackets and low-down traiterous F*#$ing swine! You see, having never played a game like this one I decided to work my way up. I started with no job and accepted the position of General Manager of the Cleveland Monsters, assuming Cleveland was a low as a man can start. It apperared to be good job. Playing with the awesome tools at my disposal I spend the first hour assembling my roster into elite and dangerous line changes. Satisified, I advance a few days. Suddenly an email pops up telling me that, argueably the best player on the team has been called up. Dammit, says I. I'll have to spend another few minutes tinkering. So I tinker away and right the wrong done to my team. I advance another day, and not 1, not 2, but 5 players are called up. Now for a persnickety fellow like myself this sets my anus to clinching. Deep breaths are taken. But, dow...

I gave this game a try when i saw it on sale (50% off) but ended up asking for a refund. I loved the depth of the leagues, tactics, and mangerial/coaching options. The salary system also appeared to be very well done. Overall I can see that the game makes a solid attempt to deliver on its intention to be the most authentic hockey strategy game, however there are major downfalls that prevent it from reaching this goal. Most importanly, the user interface is extremely cumbersome. Whoever was in charge of it's development should be fired. clickable shortcuts to view important things like player attributes when setting lines are not present. Instead you have to navigate to a different menu to view what you are after (player ratings like passing ability, checkign etc.), memorize those and then navigate back again. This is really difficult to do and very time consuming. A useable interface is lacking in almost every aspect of the game. Imagine trying to assign scouts to free agent...

I have been playing sports simulations since the late 80s and basically buy all the newest versions of all the top sports sims out there year by year. I was excited when OOTPB announced they would be making FHM innitially, however i quickly dumped the first game. When #2 came out i simply ignored it, but decided to spend my hard earned $ on the 3rd edition. Personally i think this was a huge mistake, i have already deleted the game. For one, this is a poor mans version of OOTPB, which is by far a more furnished and finished product in every single sense of the word. Considering FHM has the backing of OOTPB, i am shocked how the layout is so poorly setup. The colors and layout are painful to look at times. Just looking at this game is irritating, clearly not enough time was spent on the design. The thing i hate most about this game in comparisson to OOTPB is their lack of editing and modding. If in that game you can basically edit everything, here you are very limited. In fact, you ca...

As a giant hockey fan, as well as an OOTP addict I was very excited to give this game a try. However, I have found there is still a lot of work needed for this game to be considered a realistic sim. Perhaps this game satisifes the average hockey fan, but for me there is a lot to be fixed. First and foremost are player ratings and positions. Too many players have terrible ratings (either rated much too low or much too high) and their positions are all wrong. I put hours into re-rating players and it still is hard to make accurate because of the numerous attribute listings and the uncertainty of their impact on overall rating and potential. Also in terms of positions, many forwards have center listed as their position when they haven't played one game in the NHL at that spot. Also, I'm assuming that LD and RD listed as seperate positions are in someway neccessary for the AI to set line ups because otherwise that totally complicates things and is sort of ridiculous. Off the top of my h...

Buffalo got Gabriel Landeskog AND a draft pick for Evander Kane. 10/10 would trade with Joe Sakic again But on a more serious note, this is a massive upgrade on the first two, bug-filled, installments in this series. For the first time in 10 years, I have a hockey manager game I really enjoy playing.

Since this is a manager-game it's all about UI and presentation. Sadly the UI is really terrible. The UI is unintuitive. It's hard to find things and even harder to understand how to do some things at all. And there are a lot of unnecessary screen-transitions. During game simulation the recap are hard to follow due to no actual log present.

This is one of the best Hockey Sims I have ever played. I have purchased all 3 iterations of FHM and they continuosly improved year over year. The speed in which you can sim seasons compared to old versions of EHM is fantastic. The new international tourneys are a great add - the game can be a little glitchy at times crashing from time to time after running the game for a while (usually multiple seasons).

It looks a little bit more polished than FHM 2, but FHM 2, to me, has this game beat hands down in terms of creativity and enjoyment. The UI isn't very good, and the computer makes some really, really bad trades. FHM 2 had it's flaws, but I found it a better game. Also, the injury bug knocked FIVE of my players out for 4 months or more. I wasn't the only team with that problem. I also miss having the ability of multiple human GMs, something not in FHM 3. All in all, I would suggest waiting until the price comes down significantly on this before buying. I don't want to sound too harsh on them, as this game has potential, but it's not quite there yet.

Could be a great game in the future. It needs some patching and the UI is not all terrible but is frustrating to navigate. Right now its not worth full price.

This game has a good idea but it is perfected poorly. If the developers of this can make a UI similar to Out of the Park 18 this game will be worth the purchase but until then I cannot recommend this game.