Championship Manager 2006

The childhood fantasy of managing your favourite football team has prompted a huge range of management sims since the mid-1980s, none of which have enjoyed the success of the Championship Manager franchise on PC and latterly the home consoles.

And now here it is on mobile. Taking control of your favourite Premiership football team (sorry, Sheff Wed fans), your goal is to train it, impress the fans, appease the demands of the board of directors and maintain the respect of the media. Oh, and there's also the trifling matter of winning the Premier League.

The menu system is simple to navigate and you'll soon find yourself skipping from screen to screen, organising your newly acquired squad with ease. Lacking the mind-boggling databases of its desktop-based elder siblings, there is nevertheless a surprising amount of statistical depth on offer in this mobile version.

The squad screen allows you to quickly check on your players' availability, assign positions and compare the quality of two members of your squad. Each player is given a single 'Ability' stat, which is a measure of how good they are on a scale of 1-99. You can also view an individual player's profile, taking you to a new screen containing detailed stats of their past performances.

Each player also has a brief individual description, though these can sometimes seem out of keeping with their real world counterparts. Good examples of this include Wayne Rooney, described as an 'easy-going flair player' or Ronaldinho as the 'old-fashioned targetman'. Whether or not these descriptions affect their performances isn't particularly clear, but our experience suggests that Mr Rooney is the more prolific striker of the two.

From this screen you can call your overpaid soccer star in for a one-to-one meeting to offer him praise or fine him for poor performances on the pitch. You can also create a personal training regime for each individual, although this is limited to setting the number of sessions that the player attends each week, with no option to specifically tailor the content of an individual session.

Should you find yourself dissatisfied with the locker room-full of donkeys you've inherited from the previous gaffer, you have the option to put them all on the transfer list and bring in some new blood. The transfer list is separated into three parts, distinguishing between domestic Premier League players, lower division players and foreign players.

While you can view the stats of footballers from your own division, buying from the foreign or lower leagues can be a bit of a lottery as the only stat you can view is their price tag.

Once you've brought in your new signings, it's time to organise your squad, picking from ten preset formations that should be familiar to footballing fans.

From here we move on to choosing a playing style – again ten options are offered, varying from the the silky samba style of the 1970 Brazil 'Team of the Century' to Wimbledon's 1988 'Crazy Gang' nuts and guts approach.

Finally, choose your team's level of aggression and gamesmanship – we prefer to opt for minimal levels of the former mixed with a healthy serving of rule bending and ref-baiting.

The matches themselves are traditional Champ Man fair, with commentary text overlaying an image of your stadium. There can be a lack of variety within this commentary – you'll probably see phrases repeated within your first 90 minutes in charge – but this serves to add a degree of charm rather than spoil the atmosphere.

During the matches you can access a useful stats screen to see which players are struggling, or introduce substitutes and a change of formation if you feel things aren't going your way. There's also a handy Quick Match option, which seems to produce more goals than the normal mode. This takes away any degree of control you have during each game, too, so it's best saved for those occasions when you're short of time or certain of a victory over much weaker opposition.

Each season is frequented with random occurrences that can have a positive or negative effect on your bank balance, your team or the opinion of fans, media or members of the boardroom. For instance, you might find yourself bemused as your club's chairman orders in a Feng Shui expert to rearrange your stadium for an extortionate fee. Alternatively, you could find yourself offered a pay rise, which can have an additional knock-on affect on your players' morale depending on whether you choose to accept it or hold out for a better offer.

These neat touches add an extra dimension to proceedings, helping you feel more involved as you're immersed into a world of media questions and financial dealings. This is probably just as well considering the very basic level of the visuals and total lack of sound. It's unfair to judge this minimalist approach to sounds and effects too harshly, though, given the quality of the other areas of the game.

Championship Manager 2006 is an enthralling and entertaining gaming experience that should satisfy hardcore fans of the franchise and casual dabblers alike.