  Bringing on the pain in EA's 'Arena Football'. |
Football is great for one fundamental reason. Forget scoring touchdowns and all that stuff. The whole premise of the game is to destroy, maim, demolish and mangle the poor sap who has possession of the ball. What could be better than that?
Praise be to those European medieval peasants who couldn't get enough out of grown men annihilating each other over a pig's bladder. You gotta like any sport too that was banned throughout history by those snooty English monarchs who wore wigs and covered their bodies with chalk.
For those Canucks like myself who have no pigskin to watch when the NFL and CFL seasons end, American arena football is a clever concept. Imagine shrinking the field in half, putting hockey boards around it and allowing players to "rebound" the ball off the boards and cream players over them. Minus some rule changes, that's arena football.
The simplicity of the actual game itself transfers well. 'Area Football' is a snap to figure out. Once you understand the rule changes such as only one linebacker may blitz from the side of the line opposite the offensive tight end and that the other linebacker cannot blitz until the ball is thrown. The game won't necessarily wallop you though if you happen to forget that in versus modes. It will politely ask if you wish to enforce the penalties or not. In career games, you pay the price for such blunders. Fair is fair, right?
Barring the rule changes, 'Arena Football' is one of those games you can play right out of the box. The instruction booklet is barely longer than your standard sized pamphlet and for me, that's a good thing. Skip the prattle and put me in the game, coach. I just wanna crush someone.
Arena football is designed to be fast-paced and high scoring. So too is the video game. There is not much need for short passes here. Long bombs and rushing plays are the standard. Things move along quite quickly and are only bogged down when you have to choose an offensive or defensive play to call. Me, I let the AI coach do all the work and then I made the adjustments on the field as the situation dictated. In that way, you return to the gridiron mayhem and your potential thrashing victims more quickly.
What really puts a different spin on things in arena football is that when the ball bounces off the field goal netting or the boards, it is still considered "live". So, yep, a receiver can catch the ball off the end zone boards to score a touchdown. Now, that's what the WWE's Carlito would call "cool".
For those like me who want to sadistically clobber opposing players and view the sport as more of a showdown between gladiators without Russell Crowe waxing all poetically and crap, 'Arena Football' really plays to that mentality. You can steamroll opposing players after they have scored a touchdown. Take that, chump! You can plough opponents over or into the boards. To put the icing on the cake, when they sail over the support structures they usually land on display tables or expensive electronic equipment too which explode in a shower of sparks ECW style. You can even take out an official or two. Of course, this is stretching things just a bit as that sort of unruly behaviour isn't sanctioned or tolerated in the real league but it sure makes for some heartlessly great gameplay that twisted individuals like myself are fond of.
While the bone-crunching action is tops the audio is not. There is no play-by-play to speak of and the arena announcer sounds like one of those automated telephone voices after they have sucked down a cocktail of speed and helium. He just sounds too darn happy for his own good, if you know what I mean. What is even cheesier than that is the robotic "thank you" message that plays after each and every game. It is from the league president who it seems is some kind of android developed by Industrial Light and Magic.
I like unsophisticated football video games. I don't care to set plays, stall the action by scrolling through pages and pages of playbook screens or participate in a draft or alter my roster, although you can do all of that in 'Arena Football'. All I want do is throw or run with the ball and mash as many players as humanly possible in as many ways as possible. EA's 'Arena Football' does all of that quite nicely.
WHAM! Rating: |
7 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
E10+ (For everyone 10+) |
Official Web Site: |
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