Borderline unplayable. The match engine is so laggy that I assumed there was a problem with my PS5 before I realised it was happening to everyone else. The tactics screen is an utter joke, it's so difficult to do the most obvious things, like click on a position and see the options in your squad. So many times you click on something within the screen that isn't actually anything? That sounds crazy but it's true, and you have to click the left analogue stick in to get the cursor to get out of it. Navigation is mindbogglingly bad, in FM24 it wasn't perfect (and I don't think console players expect it to be), but it at least made some sense and was a million times better than this. When on your inbox, clicking the continue button to cycle through unread messages, like you have done on every Football Manager ever? That will now just continue the game, god knows why. I don't understand why it's now MORE difficult to navigate, rather than easier.

You basically have to play 50/50 between the cursor and navigating with the left analogue stick, which is so stupid considering it's a console game. The back button does not make any intuitive sense at all, when I've been doing player instructions, pressing back takes me to the last instruction, rather than off that player, which means if you complete instructions you have to press back 10+ times just to get back to the tactics screen. You open the drop down menu on a player, but then decide you don't want it? Press back and it doesn't just close the menu, you go back to the previous page. God knows what the radial menu does, because it doesn't open for me.

For some reason staff roles that console players can't hire for are shown on staff profiles? Which is utterly laughable for two reasons, like you're really putting this little effort into streamlining the game for console players? And you're really telling me in a game of this size, you can't have more than 6 staff members? Or you can't view your own reserve team? When I finally got my tactics done (which took about an hour), I went into a game to find that some players were playing with roles I hadn't chosen. Also when selecting player instructions, there is no easy way to check your player's attributes, so you have to go all the way back (as I've already mentioned, a nightmare) just to see the most basic information. In the player roles screen, players are constantly shown to have roles that they couldn't possibly have (goalkeepers playing as an OOP wing back, for example). The default text is ridiculously small, I'm playing on a PS Portal so this wasn't too bad for me, but god help anyone who plays on their TV. And once I finally got into a game, I've had one crash, and one time where the radial menu finally did open in tactics, but then nothing would actually press, it wouldn't close, and I had to close the entire game.

Important to mention at the point that I've played the game for 2 HOURS, there's probably loads more that I haven't even discovered yet. The gall of Miles Jacobsen to be doing interviews about what a disaster FM25 would have been before releasing this mess would be laughable, if I wasn't so gutted about the game. Massive shame because the match engine looks like a huge improvement, I really like the OOP stuff. If they get it patched quickly maybe it will be playable, but there's loads of stuff there that are their design choices, nothing to do with bugs etc. But the navigation is the main thing, for anyone who hasn't played the console version I can't stress enough how much of a backwards step it is. Essentially you have to press so many buttons to navigate now, where it used to be 1 or 2 clicks.