[Review] 90 Minute Fever

Sports Management Sims are chock-full of strategy, variety, and a plethora of options to customise your experience, making it a staple for every sport fan. Sadly, 90 Minute Fever commits a bunch of foul plays that will make even staunch fans start booing.

The idea is simple, you take on the role of the classic football manager, guiding your team through victory. Everything is menu based for the most part, with everything from training, to formations, and strategies being guided by your delicate management and understanding of the many variables constantly at play. You will be constantly having to ensure everything is tweaked and in your favour if you really want to see real success for your team and win some crucial games. The main selling point is that all of this happens against real players in an MMO fashion.

The experience can be quite daunting, hitting a new player with quite the confusing UI.  The barebones tutorial was just enough to get me around the many menus, clarifying the interface somewhat, yet it doesn’t go into enough detail about other aspects of the experience.

Stats and what they do were never clearly covered, this is something that other management sims usually do go into, so I found this to be a weird thing to exclude. Thankfully, having played other similar titles, I felt able to disregard the minimal tutorial and move on under the assumption things would be much the same as those previous experiences. I was woefully mistaken…

Maybe it was the amount of information available, or perhaps overall disorganisation, that made understanding the game quite the chore. I have never seen so many unexplained variables and systems in my life as a player.

Some stats are easy enough to understand, such as Endurance, and Speed, but I have no idea what Flair is supposed to do. Since there’s not a single explanation of what that is inside the game, you have to rely on external sources to get a general idea of its relevance. Having assembled a team of what I thought were the strongest players available, I felt like I was ready to tackle my first game.

Similar to other games of its kind, you will be watching the matches play out with minimal ways to interact, the only way to make some sort of change is changing tactics and players during half-time.

During these moments the lack of detail on the sprite work, coupled with the limited animations, made the match an uninteresting slog, rather than the exciting back and forth you hope to see in a game of this type. The only upside was that performance is rather smooth with little to no taxing of my hardware, but games with more beautiful and expressive 2D art still achieve similar performance.

There is a severe lack of anything resembling a soundtrack here, with whole matches being presented in near silence. Aside from some audience sounds for atmosphere, there was nothing that emanated any sense of life into the game. Perhaps cranking up the crowd’s volume, or making them more cheerful and expressive would have helped, everything felt uneventful and dry.

Despite the fact this is an online game, I couldn’t seem to find any way to chat with the other player since there is no chat option available. This generates a lot of doubts since you are unable to know if you are playing against an actual human or a bot, killing an important point for which people play online games: interaction. After such uneventful victory, I kept exploring the other options the game offers.

You have a training facility, a hospital, and you can even acquire other players for your club by bidding on them against other real players with your club’s funds.You can also control the amount of cash flow your club is generating based on performance, all of these mechanics common to the genre. In the training facility you can affect the stats of your players by spending Development Points. These are a limited resource that each player you own has available.

You also have access to the player academy, here you can train the future members of your youth team. Players going through the academy are time locked, limiting you to waiting for each new player to complete their training before they are available.

There are two queues you can access to play your matches, Youth and Senior. You have a limited amount of games you can play per season, and once you finish your fixtures, you will have to wait in real time yet again… This limiting factor can have a detrimental effect on your ranking. Similar to other competitive games, your rank is built upon you winning a lot to make considerable progress. Matches can play automatically when you aren’t logged into the game, adding yet another problematic feature due to the fact you can’t be there to adjust tactics. Another thing that is surprising is the severe lack of game modes, it would be good if they could add more ways to play the game aside from the aforementioned ones.

Realising most features are time walled in the style of a mobile game, I opted to look into more information about how to play efficiently that could help me understand the mechanics better. For this I had to resort to the internet, as the game itself gives no information, being rather obtuse and obfuscated with even the most basic of details. This adds yet another layer of complexity that makes the experience feel more like a chore.

Formations are a very crucial part of the game and often define who wins. Despite the amount of variety the game brings, all of these options are always overshadowed by tried and true meta tactics, reducing the overall experience to a limited number of winning strategies and adding to the tedium of this aspect of my time playing.

Even with a growing understanding of the importance of player formation, RNG is rife. There were many times when I seemed to be dominating, but suddenly during the last minutes of the match I suffered from a string of terrible reversals. I was left feeling as though I was doing something wrong, or misunderstanding the information I gathered.

This is where the addition of microtransactions comes in…

Originally I had ignored the in-game shop, assuming it to be a more traditional self enclosed shopfront allowing the unlocking of cosmetics, digging deeper though I was faced with a subscription model I had not been expecting to find. This subscription model provides a lot of features that give pay to win style advantages, to those willing to spend hard-earned cash on them.

Features for sale included clearer information about your players, to basic features other games have for free, such as being able to change shirt numbers or your team logo.

This went all the way to including ways of doubling Development Points for each player you own. This, along with a number of other purchasable features, completely trivialised any strategy in the game.

Another shocking bonus was the ability to auto-bid on players, making competing against paying players as a free player impossible.  Couple this with the messy matchmaking, which can pair you against players randomly, disregarding what rank you are in, and the overall experience is near unplayable for many.

Pay to Win games are not okay at all, and a system as foul as what is presented here is worthy of a red card.  Personally, I believe removing the whole subscription system, or limiting rewards to cosmetics could go a long way to improving the experience for users… While microtransactions are morally grey at best, there are better ways to implement them that avoid harming the player.

I really wanted to like 90 Minute Fever as I tend to enjoy management games, but in my experience, along with the issues with microtransactions, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth.

While there can be some improvements made to it, what this game needs is a total restructuring and modification of its greedy monetization system before the game can be worth your time and money.