Top of the League

1995 computer games Amiga games

British soccer manager game with quite unique approach to the genre - instead of filtering the match data the creators gave user as much information as possible.

One of the important bits of the creating soccer manager game is to find the perfect balance between the information user will receive and the data he needs to make the decisions. Most of the early games of the genre were limiting the amount of data due to hardware limitations, but while the computers abilities were expanding the creators could store far more data, which not always was the best idea. Top of the League is such example - you have a lot of player data, you have the personal statistics for each of the players that take part in the game, their careers, description of all the match events, but instead of making the game more attractive all of those details were killing the atmosphere of the game.

Actually it was a shame, because Top of the League contained plenty of original options unavailable in similar games of the era, f.e. we could hire plenty of different specialists in club (including dietician and hypnotherapist), we could set up unusual formations by choosing specific positions for the players in the squad, make international transfers, receive detailed reports about players and whole teams.

Creators chose unusual interface (you could control whole game via joystick only) and gave the user a lot of data to work on. The game had a great potential, but details made it a failed project - matches taking too long to play, a lot of data that overloaded the screens and not very convenient way to control the game via joystick.

Our rating
★★☆☆☆

Video
★☆☆☆☆

Audio
★☆☆☆☆

Playability
★★☆☆☆