Review by: William Abner

Talk about a tease. When you play Backbreaker, the new football game from 505 Games, it doesn’t take long to realize that in some ways this is the future of videogame football. Then you play it some more and realize this particular game simply isn’t that good.

What is good, however, is really, really good. It’s mainly the technology that sells Backbreaker; you have never experienced a football game like this. From the free flowing animations that rarely repeat themselves to the non scripted form of gameplay there is an awful lot to like about the game from a technological standpoint.

Nothing feels staged, canned, or predetermined. There’s hardly any suction blocking (when a defender is magically pulled toward an offensive lineman) because every player feels like its own entity. Taking a handoff and shooting through a hole is truly exhilarating due to the third person action camera. It’s the type of feeling an overhead game like Madden simply cannot reproduce.

You can even have success playing as a cornerback in this game—covering your man is actually possible because the camera is focused solely on the player you are controlling; this can lead to tunnel vision and not knowing what’s going on elsewhere during a play but the payoff when you jump a slant route is well worth it. If you have played football games for years, then playing Backbreaker will feel like a revelation—at first.

Once you look under the shiny hood you’ll see serious, serious game issues. Most of them stem from the complete ineptitude of the computer opponent. It can’t score. Literally. The offensive line play is flat out atrocious. You, and the CPU for that matter, only have a second or two to release the ball and the interface is so clunky that looking to a second or third target when passing is far too time consuming to be practical. This also tremendously lowers the effectiveness of online play. There’s no time to do anything.