Should I be really reviewing this? That's what I thought when I loaded it up. You see I known very little about sport - never play it and rarely watch it - the closest I get to sport is watching the odd football match whilst in a pub. That has however never stopped me from playing a certain well known Football Management simulator for hours (sometimes days) on end, so with that (and the fact that nobody else at Gamecell plays the game with funny-shaped balls) in mind I installed Pro Rugby Manager 2004.

At first glance the game seems to have taken a few hints from the well-known benchmark football management title. The whole thing is menu driven and mouse controlled. Even for a complete novice it's actually rather straightforward to navigate and you can easily find the info that you want. It also follows the day by day structure that many armchair managers may be familiar with, however one thing that soon got on my nerves were the constant news bulletins - now I'm not sure if this was because they meant nothing to me because of lack of knowledge for the game, or the actual number of them you have to put up with.

   

Once you get the hang of the menus it's on to doing all the things that managers do. There are supposed to be around 15,000 players that you can buy and sell to create the team of your dreams (or in my case a team of people who had funny sounding or famous names) - you are able to train these players and design the tactics that you wish to use when out on the pitch. But of course the manager's role also extends beyond the actual pitch and also to the daily running of the club, you have the ability to negotiate contacts of your existing players and also improve the facilities for your club.

A lot of my first hour or so was spent with the manual, which I must actually give special mention to. Usually the instructions are never looked at but with my complete lack of knowledge of rugby I actually found them not only essential but well written and informative - never did they go too in-depth, but provided me with enough information that I actually felt that I knew what I was doing! The manual combined with the way the game is designed soon had me taking part in my first match.

   

Once you get out on the rugby pitch the game jumps up a few leagues in terms of graphics as the matches are fully represented in a rather smart 3D engine. The animation of the players on the pitch certainly looks very nice and was good enough for a novice like me to actually work out what players where doing. The tackles and crunches seem to portray a feeling of power and passes, rucks and scrums etc. are also very convincing.

During the match itself you have plenty of control over what you want your team to be doing and can change your defensive (or offensive) options very easily. After a few games and some trial and error I was actually managing a good run of wins. The one thing here that I can't comment on is just how realistic these victories were, but I certainly enjoyed achieving them.

   

Pro Rugby Manager is a game that is going to sell to those people who like the real game regardless, whilst those like myself would probably leave it on the shelf. I did however enjoy my time with the game and felt an actual sense of achievement with it - I'm sure those who know more about the game would get even more from it than me.