EA Sports continues the tradition of its NCAA Football series by both improving the gameplay and mangling it all in one fell swoop. Once again, the development team fixed most of the glaring problems from the previous edition, and yet found new ways to break things that didn’t need attention in the first place. The game is a blast online or when played against a buddy on the same console, and the Campus Legend feature is now (finally) a worthy addition to the series—but if you are a solo player who enjoys Dynasty mode then the game is yet another frustrating step sideways.
The game has an unpolished, rough feel to it. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as NCAA 07 on the 360 was a stripped down version, feature wise, from its last gen siblings. This new game has more of the features you expect from a $60 next-gen big budget title from the ability to upload videos and snapshots from your games to filling out your "shrine" with earned trophies, but many of the new features come off as hurriedly implemented and in need of additional development time.
For example, a brand new recruiting model is in place. You can make the argument that of all of the things that needed redesigned—the recruiting model wasn’t one of them. Still, the old system is gone and replaced with a “call system” where you get “10 hours” per week to call the 35 recruits on your target board. You need to first gauge what is important to a recruit and then spend time talking to him selling him on the strengths of your program. For an elite school like Ohio State, this is painfully easy because they are rated as “elite” in many categories. If the Buckeyes set their sights on a 4 or 5-star kid who shows early interest in them then he’s going to OSU. It’s more fun and more of a challenge when playing as a lower tier program, but it shouldn’t be this easy, even for the big boys.
In addition, you can now make “promises” to recruits in the form of playing time, and so on. The thing is, you don’t need to use this feature if you are a good football program. Kids will come to play at a good school regardless, and the calling feature becomes borderline tedious. Recruiting is on a week to week basis and manually doing all of the calling gets boring and time consuming and feels more like busy work; thankfully you can let the AI take over the calling but leaving this up to the AI is risky at best. Recruiting is such a huge part of the college game, but this new method doesn’t add too much, especially when areas of the gameplay still need attention.
Every year it’s something: there was the year where wide outs dropped ten passes a game, then there was the year that the defensive backs refused to play defense; then there was the year that the CPU couldn’t run the ball at all. Each year EA Sports fixes something, and something else breaks down. This year’s stick in the mud is interceptions. They’re everywhere—every game. The CPU picks off passes at a high rate but you can usually chalk that up to human error. The problem is that the AI throws picks in bunches this year, which absolutely kills the drama of the solo game. On default settings you can expect anywhere from two to nine interceptions in an 8-minute quarter game—every game. It’s that bad. You can fix this by playing on the hardest level of difficulty and dramatically altering the game settings in favor of the CPU but that is a shoddy alternative. Who wants every quarterback to play like an All-American?
The problem should be fixable simply by altering the in-game sliders, which allow you to tweak certain aspects of the gameplay. On paper, it should work, but in practice, it doesn’t help. Lowering “Quarterback Accuracy” actually lowers arm strength. Lowering the Interception meter to zero should fix the problem, but it doesn’t. Some of the sliders may as well not even be there. It’s aggravating.
There are other annoyances in the game but they pale in comparison to the interception issue. The commentary gets old, because it is old. It’s the same stuff we have heard for years. It’s still too easy to scramble with a fleet footed quarterback; special teams play is weak—rarely will you see a fair catch because the coverage team is slow in getting down the field. Receivers still, amazingly, run ‘out patterns’ five yards out of bounds. Seriously, how many years will this be in this game? Stop on the sideline already. Throwing a lob pass is also a lot tougher than it should be; most passes are either sky high moon balls or bullets (this may be part of the interceotion problem.)
In addition, the Top 25 ranking AI still needs work. If Florida beats Tennessee during the year 38-10, and Florida is 10-1 and the Tennessee is 9-2 – Tennessee cannot be ranked higher than Florida. Period. It cannot happen. It does in NCAA 08. If Texas loses in week one to Arkansas State, they should in no way make it back to the BCS Title game over other one loss teams. No way, no how.
