When I was younger, I occasionally played those text-based football games. I'd choose your plays from a list and then the game would tell me what happened.
I'd pick a Hail Mary or a Long Bomb and watch the text slowly appear on the screen:
"PASS...............................................................INCOMPLETE."
I couldn't comprehend of a more boring football game. That is, until now. Although Electronic Arts has become synonymous with sports titles over the years and clearly they have put in a lot of effort here, NFL Head Coach is not a good game.
Here, the plays include the accompanying graphics with all those circles and arrows I never could understand. With suggestions from the lower coaches on your team, you pick what play you wish to run and then sit back and wait.
In most football games, even after you pick a play, you control individual players on your team. Here, you are only a spectator.
On offensive plays, you hit the "x" button for the snap, but you are literally the coach on the sidelines as you watch your little computer characters do all the work. You can challenge penalty calls. Between quarters and during timeouts, you can also motivate your team through pep talks to raise their trust level in you. But that's about it.
As the season progresses, your team improves and its chance of winning increases, but the games run mostly on autopilot and so you quickly will lose interest. To be fair, though, there's more to NFL Head Coach than just playing football.
The game covers much of the business side of the sport as you progress through the re-sign period, free agency, the draft and all the way through to the Super Bowl. In addition to playing games and running training drills, you can do other tasks, such as going to staff meetings and renegotiating players' contracts.
It's evident the game developers are trying hard with this game. The graphics are solid as is noticeable in the three-dimensional office environment where you can call up sports agents, look at your trophy wall and use your computer to check your e-mails and surf for new articles on NFL.com. All the while you are serenaded by a rearrangement of "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor."
My God, it's about as exciting as actual work! I mean yes, you can play around with your roster and add plays to your playbook for game day, but most of the time you're doing menial administrative duties. Electronic Arts should rename it NFL Office Manager.
What's even more annoying is that you can only do these menial administrative duties at certain times. Obviously, this makes sense for trades and signing free agents, as there are set times for teams to do this. But I find it rather stupid you have to wait for the play designer task before you can make new plays for your playbook. (Then again, the editor is wonky. So it's not worth the effort anyway.)
Thankfully, you are able to skip ahead by picking a date on the calendar and the game will simulate the season up to that point. It can take awhile but at least you can avoid all the coach hirings and scouting reports. You can even skip right to the post season if you want.
This feature is also useful as you probably won't want to save your game as it takes up 2,823 kilobytes, almost one third of the space on the standard eight-megabyte PlayStation 2 memory card.
With all the meetings, budgets and game plans, I'm assuming that the developers are attempting to create a sports title to appeal the SimCity-Civilization crowd. It's an admirable attempt but the game strategizing here is rather simplistic and I imagine instead of attracting these people, it will instead alienate sport fans.
NFL Head Coach is a slick looking football game, if only you could actually play football in it.
WHAM! Rating: |
0.25 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
E (Everyone) |
Official Web Site: |
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