Shallow And wide
HIGH The fastest management game I’ve ever seen.
LOW Everything feels so opaque.
WTF Missing a 90% chance at a goal.
Hi everyone! Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com.
Management sim games, at a glance, seem intriguing, but also incredibly overwhelming. There’s a lot of math that goes into statistics about which team member is best in what position, what their win rate has been against an opposing team, how weather or a specific stadium has affected things, and more. Honestly, it all feels like a giant gate to keep most players out, but those who do manage to find their way in seem to really enjoy themselves, and Nutmeg! looked like an easier gate to open.
Nutmeg! is a deckbuilding management title where players take a low-ranking soccer team and attempt to rise through the divisions to become champions, while also doing all of the management required to get the team there. Things like marketing, trading and signing players, and hiring coaching staff. Winning games feels great, but making sure there’s enough money in the bank to keep the team together for another year is just as important.
What I appreciate the most about Nutmeg! is its attempt to be an on-ramp for newcomers to the genre. As I just said, management games are numbers on spreadsheets at heart, so the effort put towards visualizing things helps make the experience feel less like a big excel document.
For example, instead of giant stat charts, the stats in Nutmeg! are minimized to five categories, and of those five, only two feel important for each character. Hiring staff gives brief highlights on the one or two things they’re going to bring to the team. Looking at upcoming matches gives a guess on which team will come out on top, and whether it’s an away or home game. By condensing all of these factors, Nutmeg! feels like it’s the Cliff Notes version of a management sim.
Then there’s the deckbuilding portion of Nutmeg! Each match is played automatically, with only a few specific events that players can interact with — everything is on autopilot until an offensive breakaway, corner kick or a defensive steal pop up, for example.
During these special events players can opt to use cards from a deck they’ve created, and each card has three possible outcomes. If a shot on goal event happens, a card could result in the ball getting saved by the opposing goalie, the ball missing the goal entirely, or successfully scoring a goal. Balancing when to use (or not to use) the cards are key to success, as some cards will carry over to the next game if they are not used.
While Nutmeg! isn’t as daunting as other management sims thanks to this simplified interface and minimizing all of its data, I do think there could be more to it. For starters, it could be more transparent about how to play.
The tutorial mentions all of the different things you can do, but it only goes into any detail with the deckbuilding itself. Things like going through how coaches affect the deckbuilding portion, how to find out why a poorly-performing player isn’t happy, or how things like selling merchandise works is left for the player to find out on their own. Maybe the developers are assuming their players already have some of this knowledge from other management sims, but as a newcomer to the genre, these things all took a lot of effort to understand.
This lack of tutorialization seems to be Nutmeg!’s overall philosophy, which is a bit strange as it offers an abbreviated version of management on the surface, yet still wants players to interact with all aspects of the experience on a granular level. Do I want to sell jerseys or knit hats in the merch store? Do I trade a player away because they’re feeling depressed, or do I try to get their morale up and hope their performance improves? I’m choosing things at random in most cases, but I feel like I should be making more educated choices.
As for the deckbuilding part of Nutmeg!, there’s an element of chance to it that sometimes makes any preparation I’ve done feel like it’s all for naught. For example, I could make a deck with a defensive focus to make sure the other team doesn’t have a chance to score, but that doesn’t mean much if the game gives me offensive events that I’m not built for. If there’s a way to tell what the interactive moments for each match are triggered by or related to, I don’t know what they are, so strategizing feels like a fool’s errand.
At the end of the day, I’m not really sure if Nutmeg! has something going for it or not. I want the deckbuilding to have more interesting choices and more strategy, but after three seasons I felt like I was still making choices randomly. The management side seems light in an accessible way, but is this really because it doesn’t give me enough of the necessary info to go off of? It’s hard to connect with anything I’m doing, as so much of it feels like random chance.
Big fans of professional soccer or management sims may find more to like in Nutmeg! than I did, but as for me, I’m putting in my resignation from the team.
For me, Nutmeg! gets 6 shots on goal out of 10.
Buy Nutmeg – Steam
Disclosures: This game is developed by Sumo Digital and Sumo Digital Academy and published by Secret Mode. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 8 hours of play were spent playing the game, and multiple seasons were completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. Nutmeg! has nothing I would worry about for anyone. No language, violence, or sex. Manage a soccer team, play soccer matches, look at spreadsheets for money coming in and out of your team. Approved for all ages.
Colorblind Modes: Colorblind Modes are not present.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles, but subtitles cannot be altered or resized. There are no audio cues needed for play. The game is fully accessible.
Controls: This game does not have remappable controls, and there is no control diagram. Mouse clicks are everything here.
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