Results from the Fantasy Football Scout Survey showed that many of you were proud iPhone users – with plenty of others pondering such a purchase. With that in mind, we’ve been on the lookout for any new apps that may take your fancy. That’s when we came across Fantasy iTeam EPL 10/11 – a fully integrated mobile Fantasy Game on your iPhone, match fit and ready for the coming season. Here’s the skinny on our impressions…
For just the meagre sum of £1.79 you get a very slick and fully comprehensive Fantasy Football Game with more than a few of its own little twists on show. You can play it anywhere. On the train, on the toilet or sat on your perch in the seventh dress shop in a row whilst being dragged along by the missus. Perfect.
The standard fare you’d expect from a Fantasy Game is all here of course. You select an 11 man team with only a £75m budget and a 4 player per team restriction -nothing too strict then. Scoring points is nice and simple with 5 points for a goal, 3 for an assist and 5 for a clean sheet (for defenders and keepers playing over 60 minutes), a single point is docked for every goal conceded and 5 are lost for a red card.
On the transfer front the FiT crew grant you two transfers ahead of each gameweek as well as a promise of there being “bonus weeks” through the season where you will get double credits to fiddle with your team as you see fit. An interesting twist here is that transfers are active up until 15 minutes before any kick off. So, for example, you could transfer in Robin Van Persie to face Blackpool at home on a Saturday and then sell him for Wayne Rooney as he faces Wigan at home on the Sunday, and get points from both – a noteworthy tactic for the hands-on (as opposed to hands-free) manager.
It’s the extra features that set this pocket game apart though, there’s more than enough to keep you interested on the bus into work or as you slyly tinker during that seminar on renewable energy. A key proponent of this game is the “PlayerDAQ” index which, as you can probably work out, treats the players like Fantasy stocks. Players will rise and fall in sharp increments based on their popularity, so managers will be looking to use transfers to make money and boost their accounts as much as any other portion of the game.
This in-game money can also be earned, and wagered, in the special Head to Head challenges. Each gameweek your team will be randomly pitted against a fellow FiT manager with the winner walking away with an extra £200k of in-game cash for their efforts. If you fancy a more personal touch you can challenge and wager with any manager you like (up to five times in a season, and only one per gameweek) and stake upto £1m of your in-game bank balance on a given gameweek. A risky, but potentially lucrative way of earning some extra funds to bolster your XI.
On top of these lovely features there will also be a Live Scores tab which will track all your point scoring as and when it happens, a news feed which nicely collates any important news from the outside world (transfers, injuries and such) as well as in your mini-league (challenges, transfers made even personal boasts) and an ability to create custom tabs with shortcuts to anything from rivals teams and leagues to websites such as www.fantasyfootballscout.co.uk. Apparently that site’s quite useful.
Prizes are modest for the first season but FiT have worked hard to offer incentives. There’s a Manager of the Month reward of Premier League tickets and the overall winner will grab themselves an iPad. Interestingly, for those playing “PlayerDAQ” markets, there’s also a “mystery prize” for the manager with the most valuable eleven.
My biggest gripe from all this? The tiresome scrolling that is sometimes required. When you’re looking for that player to transfer in or add to your shortlist, or maybe just want to have a ganders at the state of play in the mini-league, you can’t always view as much in one screen as you would like to. However, much of this can’t really be blamed on the folks at FiT – they do a decent job of squeezing all the necessary into a 3.5″ screen.
As far as mobile fantasy football games go, this one is definitely in the upper echelons. The interface is very slick yet easy to understand, the gameplay has just the right level of intricacy about it without being overly complicated and the variety on offer is an interesting facet indeed. The standard for mobile Fantasy Football has been set here and for iPhone owners this could be just distraction required if you’re currently dismissing a second desktop game.
I’ll see you on the playing field …or boardroom, or restaurant, or bathtub. Wherever.