[GM Games] (Score 5.6 / 10) 🚨 "Pro Cycling Manager 2020 Review - It's fun and hell! Sadly, it’s both… " (Windows PC) 🚴‍♂️

[Chris 273]

Today I bring you no deep thoughts, no major revelations that, by the end of the review, will attempt to teach some moral lesson or give you food for thought. Today the issue is serious, so let’s just get straight to it and talk about what feels like the longest con in gaming history!

 If you’ve been playing yearly release games for a few years now, you know how this goes. Fresh coat of paint, add a couple of cheesy new features to try and appease the player base, brand it according to whatever year it is being released in…and call it a brand-new game! Most game series take this approach more times than they actually should, but Cyanide (recently partnered with Nacon) always takes this approach to ridiculous and extreme levels. In fact, with the exception of a few good titles that actually introduced changes, this is pretty much the history of the Pro Cycling Manager (PCM) series. It has felt like a long (but poorly executed) con for years now, but Cyanide keeps getting away with it because there isn’t any actual competition to make them change.
 Which means that if people want an actual cycling game, they will have to get PCM at the end of the day. 
  
(Pro Cycling Manager’s main menu is simply grey and boring, exactly as last year’s. But the ability to mod it makes it possible to resolve, as in the example above, with a PCM UK image. But the customization is so “easy” that reverting back to the original menu would mean having to download a bunch of custom graphical add-ons, unless I had saved a copy of the original menu. Yeah…no, thanks!)

  If you are not familiar with Pro Cycling Manager, the series pretty much puts you in the seat as the directeur sportif of a professional cycling team. Sure, let’s call it a manager, as that is pretty much what it is at the end of the day and let’s agree it makes for one heck of a better title. So far so good. You have to take on a full cycling season (or seasons) of managing your team, riders and races, trying to find the best results, trying to please (and keep) your sponsors, dwelling into the natural problems that hinder real life cycling. Well, except for the biggest of them all, but that really isn’t a theme for today. The great thing about the PCM series, and the same happens in its latest iteration, PCM 2020, is that you get the best of both worlds – you actually have to take on the managing aspect of the game, while also being able to control your cyclists in the actual races.
  
 This makes for a very, very fun premise. One in which you have to manage cycling to the depths of actually instructing what your cyclists will do on road, as a team manager has to do, which in this game means pretty much racing as them and controlling their every moves. Trust me, it’s fun. It’s a great premise, it seems like the foundation for a superb game, a superb review and happy customers. Right? What could possibly go wrong? How about nearly everything? 

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To read the full review, goto: https://gmgames.org/pro-cycling-manager-2020/review/