"Do you recommend this game?"

NO, not at this price and not in it's current state.

Do I like the game and see the potential?

YES, this sim has a high ceiling and I hope and pray I can change this review to a thumbs up sooner than later.

Seriously... when you are charging $35+ for a game, at least have some fundamental standard that you prioritize. I don't want to play a simulation game where basic things are broken like sorting on certain columns, or a back page function that doesn't remember your last configuration/filter.

If simulation games 20-30 years older can do exactly what you're trying to do and have done it extremely well in the past, that should be the "standard" you try to at least reach before you present anything furthermore. Zero excuses in my opinion.

Aside from the headscratching "Dev, why can't you not sleep just for a night and fix the most obvious unsightly detractions", this simulation is very rewarding and I am actually enjoying the brunt of the mechanics.

Simple obvious polish is all that is needed, for instance when both teams are the same trim color, the text labels will use the same color for both teams, which is annoying and confusing when you are trying to immerse yourself in the details, it's like trying to watch two teams wearing the same uniforms. Also a game puck indicator that seems to follow a hidden random agenda to what the play by play is actually saying, or penalty countdowns which start fine, but executes in a completely 'F- failed function coding class' buggy mess.

Plusses:
- Real players/teams. The NHL/PA licensing is great and this is the type of sim I will love to tinker around with in various historical fantasy tangents

- Engine that is more believable than smoke & mirrors at this point. Text play-by-play retty much reminiscent of Championship Manager 01/02 (Football Manager before it went 2D) and that era of sports sim engine.

Minuses:
- Unpolished, untested, sloppy coded front-end, broken functionality that is there but not working properly under various contexts

- Setting a player trade with a team and finally clicking "Offer trade" leading to home screen with no indicators/prompts/results and then going back to the trade window manually has the same trade ready to go/repeat into loop-of-nothing. Seriously, how the heck do I trade a player?

- Resolution settings seemingly not working at all (fixed default regardless of what I set including after a restart)

- Momentum meter doesn't seem very realistic or in tune with the action being portrayed

- Puck indicator that seems to have a mind of its own compared to the action being portrayed

- Game engine playback settings that don't stick and have to be reset every game

- No player comparison

- No line presets

- No steam cloud save

(my opinion after open-minded 6 hours of casual play)

I own Franchise Hockey Manager 1 to 4 and sadly still wouldn't reccomend the series.

The interface is clunky and very unintuitive, a lot of the mechanics are hidden and appear game breaking to newer users. The game doesn't feel very immersive and the hockey world you're operating in is sterile and paper thin. None of these issues are new and I experienced them in all previous versions.

I purchased number 4 today and have had to end and restart five different saves due to crashes which I can't get past regardless of what I try.

All in all I can't reccomend this game, I don't feel like the team have actually made any improvements since FHM1 and in many ways it feels like the game is regressing.

Not right now.

Not in it's current form. Way too sloppy, way too many errors. And under polished.

If you want to support sports management sims, by all means. But OOTP needs to stop pricing this as a finished product and take a deep look at themselves, and decide whether they want this to be a money grab, or actually grow a fan base.

I own FHM 1 through 4.

Love the game, finally getting over the old tried but true East Side Hockey.
Loads of improvements that help ease of life, good step in the right direction.

It pains me that the sim speed has not been improved at all, as that is many peoples gripe, aswell as my own biggest. Almost to the point of making me not reccomend, but alas, enough other things have changed to make that silly.

Great game overall, definitly taking steps in the right direction. If the sim speed is improved in patches, it will easily overtake EHM and become my favorite hockey manager on the market!

I have played quite a few hockey manager games, but FHM4 has really stood out as a drastic improvement, making it the best hockey manager game out there currently. The multiple gamemodes and historical accuracy in this game are amazing, especially the historical challenges. I took on the 1969-1970 Bruins challenge to win 3 Stanley Cups by 1978 which I achieved by being graiced upon by the hockey gods to have a moderately-healthy Bobby Orr throughout his entire career (he retired at 32 still, lol).
Overall this game is very enjoyable and the NHL licensing makes it that much better/immersive, FHM4 will improve year after year and will keep evolving to an even greater hockey manager.

A 2017 game, CPU intensive, USES ONLY ONE CPU THREAD!! SO SLLLOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Not much has really changed since FHM2, FMH3. It still poor at showing data. You would think people who create data sims would at least display the data in different ways to help manage our teams. They have the data within the sim and yet we get the same spread sheet that fans can get about their favourite hockey player. They are still in a huge need for a Data Scientist to help them display their data better.

There is no quick graphs of how a player is playing over time, you just have to remember numbers. Make a change and see if it has any effects? Remember number that as the season progresses change less (as the data gets lost in the sample size).

Love the game for sure, but very disappointed paying 37 EUR for a game, which crashes from time to time and dosn't have the basic things fixed.


At this stage, i wouldn't recommend buying it and would just like my money back :D

Wow, so I'm 90+ hours into this game, and I guess after this much time, I should give it a thumbs up. But there are still a lot of issues with this game. It's certainly not worth full price. Here's hoping future editions clean up all the bugs?
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The Good
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It's a pretty good hockey simulation. You get the chance to be the GM and Manager of a Pro Hockey team, and the player ratings seem to be mostly up-to-date. And you can modify the ratings if you don't agree, or if a player ends up developing into a Superstar and you want to mirror that.

It's basically OOTP but Hockey.
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The Bad
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Apparently, from reading other reviews, if you try to do a lot of custom stuff, the game gets unstable fast. For me, I have only encountered one game breaking (So awful that you have to quit and start over from Square 1) bug. And that was when my Free Agent Money Available went negative. From what I've read so far, this was a bug from earlier years, so looks like it's still not fixed?

There are lots of weird little bugs in the game, too. None of them game breaking. Stuff like when you're actually playing a game, the Powerplay clock goes nuts, and keeps flashing the last 10 seconds over and over again. Or the game will announce someone got injured in the game, but they keep on playing.

Other things wrong in the game are just design choices and lack of flexibilty in the model. Why can't I change financial rules only on July 1? Why do top FA's sign so quickly to other teams? The UI for choosing Strategies and Roles for your Players is set up such that they keep defaulting to bad choices.

Like OOTP a lot of things aren't explained anywhere. Like I still have no idea if there's a difference between having one Assistant Coach or 20. I still haven't found an easy way to tell my AI assistant to scout all the hockey leagues in the world, so despite having 30+ scouts who aren't even busy all of the time, I'll still end up with many top rated players not getting scouted. The UI should offer to do this automatically, IMHO.

TLDR Version: There's lots of stuff that should be automated and lots of things you never get told about or can look at easily.

So, yes, I don't recommend FHM4. Not at full price. Wait til FHM5 and see if there's less complaints about bugs, etc.

This game is good and on the verge of being great. What I don't understand is why they can't implement a match engine similar to the one used in Eastside Hockey Manager 2007, a match engine where you could actually watch the game play out on ice. If they could develop a better, 3D match engine, the game would be significantly better and more fun to play. Great job though in a good improvement over last year's game, which was not good at all. Keep at it, gentlemen, you're on the right track!

Best modern Hockey Sim available at the moment. It's a lot of fun but first let say I am hardcore EHM player dating back to before the Sports Interactive days when it was basically a one man garage project. That said, FHM4 is a lot of fun but there is still some quirkiness, clumsyness to the interface.

I mean there TONS of interesting data in the game but not a lot of it is intuitive to find. I feel like I have to fight the interface to find what I am looking for and at some point I just give up. It would be nice to have an easy to find Average Rating of players, highlights on news that are related to our teams, colored visual stats improvement as the player develop. It is still a work in progress in a way of rendering the statistics presentation in a more friendly manner.

Otherwise the game does a nice work of simming the games with what seems to be accurate results, you can go totally crazy with the tactics as theres seems to be endless combinations.

Still pending tho is the horrible coaching bug in wich AI coaches (if you dont coaches game yourself) dosent seems to be able to adress talent correctly when making lines (example: Montreal Canadiens Glachenyuck as C on the 4th line after Mitchell and Danault). But they are woking on it.

EDIT: I can only speak for myself but 60 hours strong and this game never crashed or freeze on me. Also the processing time is nowhere near light speed but it is more than adequate assuming you dont run it on a potato.

TLDNR: Overall I recommand because seriously right now there is nothing else. Clumsy interface. Work in progress. Still fun, Tons of options. Hopefully couple of nice patches turn this into a real killer but as of right now I give it 2.5 3.5 (with all the recent patches and fixes as of January 2018) ability on 5 potential.