Whilst it may never have trashed a hotel room or had a drunken punch up with a member of the paparazzi outside a nightclub at 3am, in many ways the Championship Manager series is a bit like the band Oasis. Both were huge in the Nineties but then, after some important members departed, new releases were no longer the big events they had been. Just like the Manchester rockers however, since the clamour has died down, the Championship Manager series has produced some of its best work and the new 2008 edition is a prime example of this.

There's a standing tradition in football management games that, whilst each year's new releases contain some fresh features, they always stick very rigidly to a tried and tested historic formula. The first thing to note about CM08 is that it doesn't break away from this heritage by including any kind of hallucinogenic footballing moments where giant space walruses bend the fabric of time by curving freekicks around the moon. Instead you get the usual serious combination of more menus than the Ritz restaurant, more text than every football autobiography in the world put together and more figures than the statistics from the National Society for Statistics annual conference on statistics.

With so much information to work through, CM08 could quite easily be a daunting and confusing experience for newcomers and a frustrating slog for returning veterans. Thankfully however, this new edition of Championship Manager continues the good job begun by versions from recent years of providing an easy to navigate operating system. This includes help text, which explains what an icon does when you highlight it with the mouse, and a help file for every single screen, which gives you a more detailed breakdown of the use of everything in front of you. The new layout skins also have big buttons to take you back or forward one screen or straight home and quick use drop down menus. The game does all this with a metallic finish that makes everything look like a classy car showroom, while randomised backgrounds that feature well-loved footballing sights, which include the injury time board being held up but sadly exclude a recreation of Steve McClaren using his preferred method for picking the England squad, a system that involves a dartboard and a blindfold.

As well as its fresh looks, CM08 also features an increase to twenty-seven in the number of countries with playable leagues, plus the customary database update, this time to the end of the 2007 August transfer window. Player values and transfer fees are credible virtually all of the time, which is no mean feat when you consider how many are included, and the large amount of sale and purchase options available mean that a deal can usually be done if you want it badly enough. That is unless your board make one of its seemingly random decisions to frustrate your efforts by not allowing you to get anywhere near a player's wage requests, despite there being more than enough surplus in your wage budget - a frustrating quirk that can also raise its head when you're trying to retire members of your current squad.

In an attempt to make the players included in the game appear more like three dimensional humans, there are also thirty-two new tendencies that can feature as part of a player's profile and determine the way he reacts in certain situations. These tendencies are important bits of information and those attached to every individual in your team need to be considered together to get the best out of them. For example, although he's right footed, Liverpool's Ryan Babel is a left winger and so likes to cut inside when making runs. This is great if the team you're playing against are strong out wide but weaker in the middle, but if the opposite is true it's a different kettle of fish, particularly if Ryan is playing with a striker like Peter Crouch who prefers to stay central rather than drifting out to the flanks.

If you feel like taking things one step further, rather than letting your computer controlled coaches deal with all the refined and expanded squad training options you can get involved with these yourself and set up specific instructions for certain players to work on altering their tendencies or even their preferred positions. The results of attempting to use the modification tools are not always positive however and, rather than them acting like a kind of robot player assembly line, which allows you to make whatever adjustments you want when you want, this uncertainty not only adds a touch of reality but also makes success more rewarding. When faced with the Mr Babel conundrum, for instance, you have the ability to stop him cutting inside or alternatively teach him to play on the right wing instead.

Along with his tendencies, each player also has profile details of his current positive and negative feelings. In another lifelike feature you can discuss with a player the things they're not happy about. Choosing this option requires careful consideration though, as your words have just as much chance of making things worse as they do of inspiring the player on the great things, although often it's obvious which option you should go for.

When it finally gets to game time, the match engine in CM08 includes even more features than ever before, allowing you to get the exact amount of the information you want out of the action and maximise your viewing pleasure. Despite the large number of setup variables the engine provides it still includes some negative features. For a start, whilst you can make pre-game, halftime and full time team talks, the range of comments you have available are not as great as those included in the Football Manager games - something that is also true of the tactical options available. On top of this, whilst it's more realistic to see the game shown in 3D graphics, rather than by flat coloured dots, the markers used for the players still look more like bowling pins than humans and take away some of the atmosphere created by the in-match sound effects, which are about the only noises of note in CM08. Finally, whilst the flow to the action has been improved on from CM07, the games are still best watched as highlights due to the number of strange events thrown up in a full ninety minutes.

One of the big features in last year's Championship Manager was the inclusion of the Pro Zone match review system, which allowed you to break down the various aspects of your team's performance post-game to try and identify good and bad features. The problem with Pro Zone last time around was that it was a bit like being given a child's plastic windmill and being asked to create a wind farm, as the in-game tools around system were not up to its level, making it very difficult to harness its potentially huge power. It's good to see, therefore, that the developers appear to have recognised this teething trouble and have now built in a Pro Zone analysis feature. This uses the Pro Zone to give you an expert breakdown of the main points of note that occurred during a match and, whilst the game's limitations mean that the system will never be as influential as it is in the real world, the inclusion of the analysis section now makes it extremely useful.

One part of the pitch in which Championship Manager continues to lag behind its main competitor, however, is the news and media arena. Despite an overhaul of these features for the new edition, which includes a nice preview sheet before each match, there still aren't enough news items and you don't have the same direct ability as with Football Manager to interact with the press, players and managers of other sides or your own fans - all of which is a large and enjoyable part of the modern game.

The job of any football management simulator is to try and envelop you in a realistic footballing world. The job of any game is to make itself easy to get into but hard to master. Whilst it may not quite have the depth or the increased difficulty level of Football Manager, with the possibility for up to four people to play at the same time, the option to manage international teams from the start and the ability for less experienced players to make things slightly easier for themselves by giving their club a rich benefactor, Championship Manager 2008 is a success on both counts. Whilst the problems mean that the developers might not have quite managed to build a wonderwall, this is definitely a game you shouldn't let slide away.

Reviewed by James Hamblin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).