Undoubtedly a niche experience, Pro Cycling Manager 2024 is similar to other detailed managerial sims. But the game can fulfill your dreams if you’ve ever desired to stat your way up to the yellow jersey.
Pro Cycling Manager 2024
Platform: PC, also on PlayStation and Xbox
Developer: Cyanide Studio
Publisher: Nacon
Release date: June 6th, 2024
Price: $39.99 via digital download
Availability: Steam
I have purposely avoided playing two different types of games over the years: sports management games and gacha games. My avoidance stems from the fact that either genre might easily trap my compulsive disposition, not from dislike or even disinterest. I simply don’t have the stamina for yet another addictive time waster, whether it’s the allure of securing an Ultra Rare ship/waifu in Azur Lane or leading a team of underdogs to the playoffs in Out of the Park Baseball. With that knowledge, I threw myself into Pro Cycling Manager 2024 and spent the next 10 days developing as a directeur sportif.
Even though the expected sense of obsession never quite happened, I felt like I could coach a real-life squad of riders out of an absolutely embarrassing finish in the Giro d’Italia when I left my lengthy managing term. The intricate simulation, which channels the complexity and disappointments of a typical work week, is obviously not for everyone. However, PCM 2024 has a certain masochistic charm if you’re trying to immerse yourself in a complex experience.
A Line of Difficult Choices
The most intricate part of the simulation is in Career Mode, where your goal is to guide a team to multiple seasons of victory. Here, the first step is to choose a roster of riders, ranging from thirty to eighteen, depending on which of the three divisions you choose to compete in. Every rider is evaluated based on their age, ability to sprint, accelerate, compete on cobblestones, and climb hills and mountains.
There is no shortage of talent on a staff that is almost five stars rated, but PCM makes sure that your work is never stress-free. Sponsors will have higher expectations of you and you will face more challenging goals. As an alternative, you can create your own team by assembling a cohesive group of talents and backup plans for inevitable injuries. PCM can occasionally indulge you if you’re the kind of person who finds inventive solutions to problems that render you incapable of doing anything else. For the most part, it showed me that managing a sports team wasn’t necessarily best done by reducing risk.
Work From Home
You will be staring at the multi-paneled screen of Pro Cycling Manager 2024 while you are taking care of office work. With areas for email, future races, finances, and a calendar, it seems like the kind of user interface that characters in movies interact with. Given the constant shortage of both time and money, the latter two are particularly crucial. Shrewd resource management is critical, whether you’re waiting for your seasoned hill-climbers to recover from a medical procedure, making sure scouting efforts can take the place of your pros, or allocating enough funds to research and development to keep a competitive edge.
However, it will take some time to reach the point where you can make astute administrative selections. Although PCM 2024 includes a tutorial, it merely covers the fundamentals of the game’s elements. You’ll need to learn how to make decisions on your own, frequently by making mistakes. Learning about the nuances of the game, such as if investing in the game will determine how much time you are willing to dedicate to building a development team of young talent.As with earlier versions, however, you will run into peculiarities due to the intricacy of the simulation. Decisions that ought to have concrete consequences occasionally don’t seem to work. It’s unclear if a vengeful random number generator or a coding error is to blame. But be aware that, much like in real life, you will experience frustrations that don’t feel your fault.
Within the Peloton
PCM 2024 presents every race in three dimensions while you’re not in the management panel or choosing to play as a professional cyclist. Even while it takes longer to load to the course than it should, developer Cyanide Studio is definitely reusing materials from their Tour de France series. Because of this, you should anticipate a conservative portrayal of riders and racing settings in addition to a ridiculously erratic pace car. Even so, it feels good to step outside of your virtual workplace for a little artificial sunshine.
The goal here is stamina supervision, just like in the sister series of Nacon. With indicators that show heart rate, effort, attacking strength, and overall energy, you can watch your rider with the same kind of attention to detail that a cardiologist would give a sick patient. In terms of engagement, you can direct your cyclist to attack, hold their position, relay, or take a gelled bite out of any athlete. Additionally, PCM 2024 has the ability to simulate the event completely or to speed up or slow down time, even though you may still micromanage everything in real-time. However, the game’s intelligence can be inconsistent, just like in earlier versions. Attack commands cause your athlete to be pushed to the peripheries even in situations where there is some room in the peloton.
In summary
Pro Cycling Manager 2024 is undoubtedly one of the more complicated sports simulations available, requiring players to be persistent and patient. Recognize that the path to a championship is paved with little, annoying flaws in addition to intricate details. However, involvedness strikes a balance with near-impenetrability. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys complexity, Pro Cycling Manager 2024 could occupy your time for several months.
Summary: Taking on Pro Cycling Manager 2024 can be daunting due to its sparse instructional and intricate supervising duties. Clearly, this is an experience best left to the statistically narcissistic, who take pleasure in watching their choices potentially pay off. This sophisticated of a simulation comes with some awful jank, which is puzzling for a franchise that has been around for almost 20 years.
On a PC, Pro Cycling Manager 2024 was used with a review code that the publisher sent.
Review Overview
Gameplay – 60%
Interface – 70%
Aesthetics – 60%
Content – 90%
Accessibility – 40%
Value – 70%
65%
OK
Summary:Taking on Pro Cycling Manager 2024 can be daunting due to its sparse instructional and intricate supervising duties. Clearly, this is an experience best left to the statistically narcissistic, who take pleasure in watching their choices potentially pay off. This sophisticated of a simulation comes with some awful jank, which is puzzling for a franchise that has been around for almost 20 years.