Let’s cut to the chase: The sports gaming world has now had three years of “exclusive” NFL Madden games and none of them have come close to the final ESPN NFL 2K5 game on the original Xbox. Earlier this year, 2K Sports announced that the company was getting back into football with All Pro Football 2K8. Due to the exclusive license deal cooked up by EA Sports and the NFL, instead of having real teams, they went after individual retired players like John Elway and (gasp!) O.J. Simpson. With the original 2K gameplay intact this could have been a real winner and a reasonable alternative to Madden, but instead we’re given a game with a lot of potential, and a lot of fun on the field gameplay, but one that in the end fails to live up to both expectation and its full $60 price tag.
All Pro Football has some great ideas, the first being creating a dream team. The idea of creating “levels” of players and only filling certain slots is a neat idea – so you have more “bronze” level players than “gold” for example, so you can’t stack your team with Hall of Famers at every position. It forces you to make some tough choices when building your squad.
After you’ve selected your medal-level players, you are stuck with a bunch of scrubs and instead of drafting them, you pick the group based on strengths – DB’s that are good on the pass or the run, for example. The rating system has changed, but in a good way. Instead of numeric ratings, you get special icons for the player, so if a running back is good at third and short situations, they are a “Third down specialist.” It sure does make sense rather than rating a guy a “95” at hands.
The gameplay itself is superb – it’s just like it was on NFL2K5 on the Xbox. That’s good and bad – yes, 2K5 was a superb game but it is three years later and not much has changed – some graphical upgrades and better play by play should have been expected but it’s basically the same game with the old guys from NFL2K doing the commentary. The animations are great and defensive backs respond to the play realistically rather than standing around like idiots or reacting while their back is turned.
While each game is fun, there’s not really anything to tie them all together. In your single player mode, all you do is play a season and then the playoffs and then you’re done. No off-season, no trades, no player editor, no career mode, no franchise mode…no nothing. The single player game tries to ramp up the difficulty level by having you play loaded teams (i.e. tons of gold level players), while you are unable to have the same ability. Talk about a stacked game!
The online play is the best part of APF as you compete against other user created teams for supremacy. While there is a leader board, there’s also the ability to create user leagues, which if you have a few dedicated friends who will actually play the games, you’ll really have a blast.
There is just so much to like about the gameplay of APF, quite often you think to yourself “if only this was in Madden,” but then you realize there’s a lack of all the features that you’ve come to expect from a football game (franchise, individual career, etc.) which is quite a bit of a let down. If this were a mid-level priced game, say $29.99, it would be a bargain, but to charge full price for a game that has so little in the way of off the field content is a tough pill to swallow.
