Start out with some soccer

For my first game review, I'm going to be talking about hattrick. It's an online soccer managing game that I've been playing for about 5 years now on and off. It has roughly 1 million users and overall is a pretty well run game.

How it works is you sign up for a team at the start, then it usually takes a couple days for you to get your team and boom, you're right in the midst of a league that's probably in the middle of the season (because you will have taken over someone's spot in a lower league who quit the game). Anyways I recommend reading the rules because it tells you a LOT about how the game works, tactics, coaches, player stats, etc.

So you'll want to look at all of your players and determine where each player fits best. Obviously a player who is excellent in scoring will be better than a player who is poor in scoring but you should check all their stats because sometimes while one player may be Excellent in scoring, he could have poor passing, playmaking, and other skills which can still be useful for a soccer player.

Once you see what position each one is best at, you put them in your positions and play! There is a league game every Sunday and a friendly game every Wednesday that you will have to setup (simply go to friendlies and publish an ad or invite some people to play you).

Anyways to rate the game:

I would probably give hattrick a 7/10.

I found it to be entertaining for a few years but it kind of can get stuck in a point where you don't want to play anymore because it runs real time (so you only have 2 matches in a week) and you can get bored, or you just simply run out of time to set a friendly up and you let your team lose training. However, there are definitely ways to avoid this. The forums are very active there and you can always talk to other players, scout for players on the market, try and figure out better formations, etc.

My only other really negative comment is that unlike some other games, the tactics are very limited. You can set your players in a formation and tell them to play "to the wing" or "offensive" but you can't really set them more detailed than that nor play them anywhere on the field.

If anyone plays hattrick please leave your own comments below about what you think.