After the original programmers of Championship Manager left publisher Eidos to produce Football Manager for Sega, new versions of Championship Manager were markedly inferior, while Football Manager leapt ahead in sales.

This time, Championship Manager has got it mostly right. As with all such games, you start by selecting a club to manage.

There are lots of leagues to choose from, and in England they go as far down as the “non-league” Isthmian, Southern and Northern leagues. This adds local appeal – we had fun lifting local side Kingstonian from the depths of the Ryman Premier.

It’s true that football management games appeal to a certain type of gamer. Despite the bells and whistles, playing Championship Manager 2010 is still a lot like playing with a football spreadsheet. Select your squad and team, pick tactics and then the computer simulates each game.

Still, we got excited over the merest of results – a 1-0 away victory over Billericay Town, for instance – and there’s plenty of drama to keep players interested.

It’s still slow going though. The computer has to plough through a database of results after each set of matches, but all the other functions are available while it processes in the background.

There have been some nice additions such as on-demand training to test players against each other, and a set-piece creator. The match screen has been improved, with fairly realistic animations of goals, highlights or the whole match.

The main screen has been tweaked to add real-time tables and statistics, and the “Prozone” offers analysis of each match.

Eidos is also offering CM Season Live, a £5 series of six updates throughout the season, containing updated league tables and squads. We have not tested this as none have been released yet.

Flaws include overly vague team talks and not enough parts of the interface are clickable links (it’s not always possible to click a player or team name and be taken directly to their page).

Still, it’s easy to get started with Championship Manager 2010, more so than with any management game we have tried recently, and the enjoyable gameplay made us want to keep coming back.