Horse Racing Manager 2 (PC CD)

Played On Windows Vista64.

As far as Horse Racing management games go on the PC, HRM 2 is pretty good, and probabaley the best one out there that i have played to date. Although there are 3 modes of play, i preferd the Horse Owner approach, managing my own stable, buying new buildings to improve my horses stats, hiring and firing staff, choosing the horses care & deciding which races to enter that suit the horses strengths.

On the management side, you get to pick the location of your stables from places like England, Ireland, USA or France for example. Then you get to pick a specific location(money permitted)within the country, where the stable will be, from 10 different places, all with advanatges/disadvanatges/neutral and varied costs. After that, you get to pick your jockys colours, and name your stable. Then its off into the World of Horse Racing management.

The games graphics are very nice, especially the 3-D races, if you decide to watch them that is, you can skip them. The audio also suits the game well i think. Overall, if you like the more serious approach to your Horse racing management games, this will suit you well, i like it allot.

This game runs fine if you just want to sit and simulate every race without taking part yourself or actually watching the horses. It will run fine but the moment you try and join in a race as a jockey or try and watch a race as a spectator it crashes straight back to your desktop. I have tryed contacting cyanide and micro applications with no reply. All the forums on the HRM2 website have been locked and closed down with no help available. Dont buy it a complete waste of money.

EDIT - SOLUTION

Hi everyone,

From my review above you can see i was also having problems with the game crashing back to the desktop however i have now got it working, i will list what i did just in case it might help someone else,

First off i opened the game up in compatibility mode for xp service pack 2 (my computor is running vista)
I then opened the options and put all graphics down to the lowest including the shaders before opening the game. After doing this i can now go to races etc and i have played it succesfully without any crashes, hope this helps someone else!

To start off, i'd like to say that i really do like this game and it is easy enough to get into aswell as being quite challenging.

It has 3 game modes:- Stable; Betting and Racing

Stable (Career) mode - You start as a stable owner, choosing a stable from dozens of places in different countries, each with their own advantages and disadvantages listed. This is all well and good but it's not clear what each aspect actually does for you and you will need to experiment a little. You can choose to buy horses or claim them from a 'claiming race' that you may choose to attend. There are a few different stats to suit different style horses and it is up to you to choose which you want and enter them in races to suit their abilities.
I have gone through a few months of the game in an evening so it doesn't take too long to go through a season/year. The game is excellent fun until you realise your money starts to dwindle away slowly despite winning a few races and consistenly getting 1 of your horses in the prize money. You pretty much have to win a race everyother week in order to make money, which isn't easy at all as there are no details for jockeys other than experience, lucidity and cost, which themselves are generally very high compared to the races winnings. Details for the tracks are also minimal so you are not sure whether it is a left handed track or right handed (horses have preferences). You are then left with a bit of a guessing game and have to remember the track details in your head. I think i may start writing these down along with Jockeys that weren't completely useless or too expensive.

It may be a case of me getting too many horses too quickly and therefore hiring too many staff increasing weekly costs - i will also start to experiment with these but it seems too complicated considering it tells you that you require certain staff. More tips like on football manager may be handy here for beginners like myself. A budget on a game shouldn't be too complicated and i would rather not spend a lot of my time going through a detailed budget when i do that 8 hours a day for a job. I guess that's what you get with a complicated manager game (although you don't have to worry so much on football manager unless you're Hereford!)

Anyway, i would definitely recommend this game just for this play mode alone.

Betting mode:-

You start with a certain amount of money and have to make bets on many races to keep increasing your profit. There are 5 tipsters that give ideas about 3 horses they fancy for the race (not always a good indication). Although they do give minimal information on latest results, more help with form guides, detailed recent results including race length, the going etc. would be helpful. A great idea following an old game called Sport of Kings on the old commodore 64 but does get boring quicly when playing by yourself. My great childhood memories were based on 2 players so this was disappointing for me.
This is an element of this on the career mode aswell so you could do 2 games in 1 with that.

Racing mode:-

This is based along the lines of G1 Jockey on playstation/xbox so i haven't played it but it looks pretty good with many options/controls. This can also be done in career mode so you can manage a stable and ride your own horses in races.

Overall definitely worth £10 and probably more compared to most xbox games. It could have been even better though. Probably a 7/10 for me.