On the 30th April 2018, all Championship Manager games will stop accepting in-app purchases. This is to allow players reasonable time to finish off any active campaigns and time to use any currencies or in-game items purchased before the Closure Date.

Exactly how much space they'll create, however, will be partly determined by one of the most significant features to be introduced in the new game: player tendencies. 'We've added something called player tendencies to try and make the players in our game a lot more like characters,' explains Shaikh. These are basically 32 different characteristics that grant each player a distinct style of play, above and beyond their numerical character attributes. Thus, you could have two wingers, each with the same character attributes, but one of them might have a tendency to cut inside, for example, while another might prefer to hug the touchline. 'Player tendencies are an indication of how a player is going to play under particular circumstances,' continues Shaikh. 'Looking at Fernando Torres, he tends to head straight for goal and he likes to push up against the last defenders. But you can have another player with exactly the same attributes, exactly the same skill levels, that has a different approach.

This gives you an enormous amount of variety, because a winger who cuts inside is obviously very different from a winger who hugs the touchline, and this affects what you're doing when you pick your team. It makes it feel a bit more like you're judging a personality.' It also promises to add a subtle depth to team tactics, and, indeed, training, since you can adjust player tendencies, over time, on the training ground. And that, in turn, makes international management a more realistic challenge, as Shaikh points out: 'As an international manager you've got to work with what you've got. As a club manager you can bring someone in and train them up over a period. But as an international manager you really are beholden to what the club managers are doing with them.' Another of the game's major features is the inclusion of the ProZone coaching tool.

While this could also be found in last season's incarnation, this year it's been given a makeover so that it's even more intuitive to use, making it much more useful. The main element of that makeover is the 'analyst view', which provides managers with the views of an objective in-game analyst, concisely summarised in just a few comments in the aftermath of each game. These provide a useful bullet-point summary of each match's most salient features, without gamers having to delve fully into ProZone's overwhelming intricacies, and clicking on each comment provides as much further information as is necessary. But there's also the 'expert view', which enables managers to go in and tinker with almost any element of the game they've just played. You might want to look at your team's movement at set-pieces, for example, or simply pick any moment of the game to play it back.

Or you might check how compressed your players are up the pitch, or scrutinise a particular player's passing or movement over the course of the game. It's even possible to pair players and view their performance, to check out a piece of man-marking, or see how your new central defender pairing is bedding down. And you can even use ProZone to check out the opposition before matches too. The potential is limitless. 'The complexity involved in these games has got higher and higher, but the feedback has, in a lot of ways, remained fairly static,' argues Shaikh. 'This is the ultimate feedback tool.'

The final major introduction this year is what the developer is calling 'constant gameplay'. Instead of sitting around waiting for the game world to update itself (a constant reminder that you're interacting with an algorithm), you can continue to play, - searching for players, checking on league tables, putting in offers, editing tactics, and picking your team. So you no longer have to sit around spending most of your time waiting. What's more, the game simulates the whole world. Which means that, unlike other management games, if you want to check out what's going on in the Italian league, or the Japanese league, you can, and you can see all the players, and stuff like their goal-scoring statistics, too. Surely there's enough on this shopping list of features to keep any manager happy - and heaven knows, football managers like shopping lists. There's the updated interface, and improved match engine; the enhanced ProZone tools; an up to date player roster; and player tendencies to inject a bit of character and personality.

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But fundamentally, the chaps at Beautiful Game are keen to emphasise the overall feel of the game over the individual features. And that's something you can only find out by playing the thing. Which means you've got a couple of options: you can check out the demo; and you can check back here next week for a full review of the finished game.