How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Championship Manager 4 is a hard one to review. It seems like such a specialized game but it's converted everyone from chain-smoking pensioners to streetwise teens over to the seedy world of videogames.

Explaining Championship Manager to an outsider is damn hard. Basically, it's the game for all those people who have sat in their armchair shouting at the telly when the manager takes off the star player for another overpriced foreigner with a floppy hair-do. You can pick any club from any of the top four or so divisions of 39 different countries (ranging from the mighty Spanish La Liga to the Singaporean S-League) and take charge. Hire and fire, bark out the instructions and reap the rewards (in respect and trophy form); you've got total creative control. And there's the small detail that it will consume your whole life.

I lost at least 2 days of my life to the last title; this is no exaggeration, the save game clock has over 48 hours totted up. It's a game that will strain your social life (unless you set up a network league with your mates). The amount of depth is staggering - 250,000 people are in the database, ranging from a 14-year-old Rochdale youth keeper to 412-year-old Bobby Robson. The game is infamous for its meticulous attention to detail: Monsieur Wenger is reputed to use it to find new players (which is funny, because in CM4 Pascal Cygan is actually good) and when Joey Gudjonssen joined Aston Villa he was quoted as being excited to play alongside Gareth Barry because "he's always a good buy." So, that's one plus the game has going for it: the players are just like their real-life counterparts. After extensive demo playing from the public, all inaccurate data was posted on SI's message board and rectified, which means if at first Henry's stats don't look as good, try playing him up front with a free role and see how that works out.

The other side CM4 has is an ugly one. The beta demo was very buggy and the gold demo was slightly less buggy. The final version.is somewhere in between as new bugs have sprung up and old ones have reappeared, such as one that crashes the game at a certain date. Scores (rarely) change for no reason. There are several problems that can stop you starting the game up at all; but just when you think you've found a chink in CM's armour, the brilliant customer service team lobs you from 40 yards. There is a comprehensive FAQ on the official website and a series of three enhancement packs will be out within a month of the game's release. If you can bear one or two little niggles for a little while, you can have the game in all its glory and then some.

The interface has changed a lot. You have your standard bar at the side, which gives you access to just about every single page you'll ever need. Along the bottom is a news-ticker that gives you the headlines of the latest messages dumped in your inbox (from transfer rumours to deals to offers to rejections, competition updates and draws, awards, contract talks and all that jazz) and in the top right you see the date, day and even the time (which lets you know when kick off time is; useless, but nice anyway). The real difference is the fact that it's all skinnable now. One of my biggest gripes was the lack of back and next buttons on the bottom like the last few versions and of course, if you haven't got used to it within a week (which I did, no matter how vociferously I protested to nearby trees and other inanimate objects), you can now download skins with them where they used to be. Other successful skins are those that make the game look like an Apple iMac, or even a can of Irn-Bru. And that's still not it - thanks to some leeway, you can add in your own background pictures (due to legal.stuff, only those kind folks that donated pictures are in the game such as Everton) and even club logos, via some unofficial fan sites.

All this and I've barely scratched the surface of the game. The concept is so simple but there's just so much to do. Just buying a player isn't as ridiculously easy as in lesser games - you submit a bid first. You can choose just a straight cash deal, maybe allowing for negotiations, you can give the team a percentage of the next sale of the player, exchange him for one of yours, or add on fees such as an extra sum after 25 league appearances. Then they've got to accept and you need to give the player a good signing-on fee and satisfactory contract (whilst keeping under your wage budget, in keeping with the stringent financial situation football is in). Then, finally, you and the other club confirm the transfer and you can assign a squad number.

Then there's the completely new stuff: assistant managers play a much bigger part this time around, advising you on almost every subject (which has unfortunately given me an intense hatred of Pat Rice). You can ask them to control the Reserves and Under 19s if you don't have the time or motivation and get them to handle the boring stuff like arranging friendlies and renewing contracts. You can also ask your coach to sort out the training, which is brand new to the series. You assign your staff to the first team, reserves or youth team and can check on how each player is getting on. If they aren't pulling their weight, perhaps you should drop them or fine them a week's wages.

There's the media interaction too. I had to issue a hands-off warning after some of Europe's elite announced interest in Robert Pires and felt pretty good about myself after a particular decision was vindicated by the fans - I dropped Franny Jeffers and after he protested, rivalz.net had a vote. 100% said I was right to drop him. Who cares if it's not real? I sure showed him! There are countless other little touches too; you can use the Kelvin system to measure the temperature on match-days and each outfield player has a goalkeeper rating just in case you need an emergency 'fix between the stix'.

You're the big man on campus, and you can check your status all the time with the 'club confidence' tab, which not only shows you what the board think of you but now you get the fans' opinion too, as well as their expectations. Fail to meet these expectations and you can expect to get the sack - but then you just need to apply for a new job!

You can have a career spanning fifty years and forty clubs if you've got a long enough attention span. There are no special modes unless you count the option to set up a league over the Internet but it really doesn't matter because you can spend so long just on one saved game. I haven't even covered the possibility that you can manage national sides, or that you can scout out teams and players; there's a lot I haven't covered really. There's just so much content, you'll think that Sports Interactive used a crowbar to get it all onto the CD! But just in case you were thinking this is just another update, let me tell you about the biggest change in CM history.

The one thing that's always worked against Championship Manager is the match day action. There was never any actual football to speak of and it was all done with little text boxes of commentary. Somehow it still drew you in, gave you sweaty palms when 'and Barcelona wins the corner' came up in the 92nd minute, but come on now, it wasn't football. It was reading! So it will come as a relief that they've finally done it - yes folks, there's football in CM4!

It's only a top down 2D view of little counters running around a playing field, but it's still football and it works brilliantly. You punch the air when your midfielder scores a thirty yard screamer and yell at your right back to hurry the hell up when the winger knocks it past and shows him a clean set of heels. You can see your tactics working, which in this instalment are no longer set up by the unrealistic and time-consuming 'tell everyone exactly where to be all the time' screens but instead more vague (yet authoritative) instructions, like where to concentrate passing and how to mark the opposition. There's no longer a cheap formation that guarantees wins and it's more down to skill and analysing your play. Of course, for the old school, you can stick with the commentary.

That's about all you need to know. The only reason I can think of for someone not wanting this game is if you're not a football fan. The only reason I can think of for not giving CM4 a perfect score is that it takes an above average PC to run it but with the amount of hours you'll spend playing the game it's probably worth upgrading for. Sports Interactive have truly outdone themselves this time and anyone who says otherwise hasn't played it enough. This is the best sports simulation ever, bar none. Buy it.

Reviewed by AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).