At the end of a long, hard season every manager deserves a well-earned break at their top holiday destination. For Alex Ferguson this means a flight to Lapland to see if he's finally managed to make his nose big enough and red enough to take over from Rudolph as Santa's favourite reindeer. On the other hand, Rafael Benitez heads straight for Disneyland Paris and his favourite spinning teacup ride, which he admires for its unwavering rotation policy. Finally, Sven-Goran Eriksson travels back to the town of Springfield in the USA to check on his nuclear power plant that, for tax reasons, he owns under the name of Charles Montgomery Burns. The thing about FIFA Manager 08 is that, like a hastily packed holiday suitcase, whilst it contains almost everything you could possibly want, when you open it up the contents explode everywhere, resulting in more than a little confusion.

The first few screens that greet you upon beginning a new career in FIFA Manager 08 give away the fact that this is a title that wants to create a complete alternative life for you as a football manager. Along with inserting the normal details about yourself, you also get to set some more intimate characteristics, such as what your wife looks like, which is slightly weird in a mail order WAG kind of way, and even whether you speak a second language. Once you've completed all the required selections and set up your new game, your personal affairs continue to make up a noteworthy part of the FIFA experience. A section of your main information screen is constantly dedicated not only to keeping you up to date on the state of your private life, but also to offering you advice on how you could improve your lot - like learning to play golf so that you can buddy up to your club's President and improve your relationship with the board. This impressive decision to integrate these aspects of a manager's existence into FIFA is taken even further by the way the game allows you to spend the financial rewards you receive on status items, such as cars and real estate, as rewards!

The visual presentation of the menu screens that drive FIFA Manager 08 are pretty standard for a game of this ilk, although the highlighting of features with bright colours and the inclusion of photos of players are stand out touches. As a departure from the norm for management games, FIFA also includes a standard EA Sports compilation of songs. After only a short while however, the perpetual nature of the soundtrack and the uneasy way the tunes sit with the subject matter begin to show why other similar titles opt for silence and it probably won't be long before you do the same.

In this modern age, the financial and commercial side of any football club is an extremely important part of its existence. Once again FIFA Manager 08 provides you with the option to get as deeply involved in the business aspect as you want to. As well as the possibility when you begin to appoint yourself to the club's board, you can also get involved in negotiations over sponsorship and merchandising deals. Things don't stop there though, as features are included that allow you to make improvements to your current stadium or design and build a new one. You can even take the first small steps in a bid for your club's world domination with the construction of other facilities such as a research facility and even a theme park! All this empire constructing doesn't come cheap however, so you get to battle it out with the directors over the pots of money available to you for spending in different areas, such as transfers and wages - but you need to carefully pick your stratagem as being too much of a hard nose will usually seriously reduce their confidence in you.

As interesting as these extra curricular activities are, and as far as they show the lengths the developers to have gone into trying to create an all-encompassing footballing experience, they aren't worth much if the actual management part of the game can't stand up by itself. Unfortunately, this is a problem for FIFA Manager, as while its coaching aspects once again offer a huge amount of options, there isn't enough cohesion in their implementation or the control system.

The initial problem with this 08 edition is that it doesn't exactly provide a friendly greeting for someone who is familiar with football management games but is picking up a FIFA management title for the first time. Meanwhile, for anyone taking their first steps in the genre it will most likely be downright intimidating. Apart from the odd text box that pops up with limited advice, the on-screen guidance notes so prevalent throughout rival games are severely lacking. As a fallback option, the instruction manual is a substantial text but needs to be just to fit in brief details on all the features that FIFA Manager 08 includes, and anyone taking the time to search through it looking for specific help for the uninitiated will be sorely disappointed.

In a similar vein, this new EA outing also doesn't match up to its main competitors in the construction of its game world. Whereas other titles have been honed to be minimal on mouse clicks and easy to navigate, FIFA Manager 08 requires you to wade through too many screens just to get to the one you want. And the lack of quick links that allow you, for example, to click on a player's name wherever it appears in the game and immediately be taken to his stats, make it even more cumbersome.

On a brighter note, your first day with your new team will see you getting to introduce yourself to your first, reserve and youth team players using the all-new dressing room chemistry features. These well thought out tools allow you to make promises to your squad as a whole on how things are going to work under your reign and what your aims are for the season. It's also possible to speak individually to current players or ones you're hoping to sign and, once again, make commitments to them about their future prospects. Making promises to players usually gives them a boost, especially in the morale department, but if they don't like what they hear or you don't follow through on what you tell them they can have completely the opposite effect.

Once you've dug yourself a massive hole by telling everyone you're going to win every trophy under the sun and pay them tonnes of cash because of this, you might decide to sort out some training and tactics! Both these areas contain all the usual features, with the training section allowing you to create regimes for the whole team, smaller groups of players or even individuals. There's even the option to bring in a mental coach or a fitness one, though the fact that you can only do this once a season makes their inclusion seem strange, as in real life the big clubs can afford these guys all the time if they want them.

The range of tactics available to you are varied enough to allow you to set your side up in any conceivable formation you require, but when you get out onto the pitch the level of subtlety between the different ways of playing that's present in other management sims isn't noticeable. As far as other tactical options go, the newly introduced set piece creator is fun to tinker around with but the movement patterns you can create for your players either seem to work too strictly or not strictly enough.

When your squad are finally out working off some of the newly acquired excess weight you've added to their wallets, you have an ideal opportunity to go straight behind their backs and look for better players to replace them. Sadly, rather than the enjoyable part this plays in other games, FIFA makes this operation something of a chore. At times the customisable player search options is incredibly hit and miss and although both the player lists they generate and the transfer list helpfully show with quick glance notes if a transfer target is unavailable or unwilling to join your club, some of the player values are a way off what you might expect.

Once again the fiddly control system means that getting a scout's report for a player you're interested in signing involves a lot more effort than it does in other management games and when the notes come through they often don't provide all the information you need to make a decision. As an alternative, the game also provides a selection of computer scouting packages, which are expensive and flood you with lots of players you will have no interest in, and random emails from agents offering you one of their clients who it's difficult to find out any further information about before you make your decision.

A final black mark against FIFA goes to its media section; whilst the newspaper style presentation gives things an authentic look, like much of the game, although there are choices aplenty, the ability to interact with the press, players and managers through it is not what it should be, or what can be found elsewhere.

On the up side, when you finally make your way through all the different decisions and variables, matches are actually shown in 3D with actual human players, playing on an actual pitch in an actual stadium. The players models may not, on many occasions, resemble their real life counterparts and the games might not be as tactically refined as in other titles but the action is varied and rival management sims should take note that a price cannot be put on the realistic feel that is created. As an extra plus the Match-Analysis-Tool might not be a Pro Zone but it gives statistics-hungry coaches a chance to break down performances to try and help themselves in the future.

FIFA Manager 08 is a massive game that tries to create a complete football coach's life for you and its hugely ambitious efforts should be admired. In the end however, the game is a lot like a going on a holiday where your hotel has fifteen waterslides, a bar in the pool, a great games room, a gym and a spar, but the toilet in your room is dodgy and the bed is uncomfortable. As good as all the peripheral bits are, if there's something not right with the important things then you never have a really great time.

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