NCAA Football 09 (Xbox 360)

NCAA 09 plays like a beta, but you can still find some fun with it.
7/29/2008 9:08 PM | 1 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Playing games against the AI is a surreal experience. The computer opponent is simply scatterbrained. It rarely looks to pass the ball deep, nearly always settling for those wide-open underneath crossing routes, which leads to laughably high completions rates, it has no idea where the sidelines are and will run out of bounds for no apparent reason. At times defenders seem to shut down like a battery that has run out of life -- standing there doing nothing in particular. It even tries to fake out defenders who aren't even there with a juke; this usually happens near the sidelines and looks positively strange when it happens. Running backs that run pass patterns out of the backfield will catch the ball a yard out of bounds -- and sometimes the game will rule it a completion. You may not see these every single game but they pop up enough to cause a lot of frustration.

Finally, in a true example of how messed up the game is, the gameplay "sliders" -- the settings that allow you to tweak the gameplay to fit your taste -- don't work. The sliders for human-controlled teams also affect the CPU, so trying to get it to work as intended is impossible. The CPU settings have somehow been deactivated.

The game could have been salvaged if the new Online Dynasty mode worked as intended. Being the first time EA Sports has tried something like this for the NCAA franchise you expect some hiccups. You don't expect your dynasty to stop working due to an apparent database error. You also don't expect to lose a game's data because the servers go down unexpectedly. This happened in our online dynasty after playing a 31-30 instant classic only to lose all of that data because the servers were offline. Playing a career online is the future of sports games, but this first step has proven a bit tricky, and right now it's best to wait for an update from EA before diving in.

EA Sports is well aware of the game's issues, and spokesmen have said that the company is working on a series of patches for those with Xbox Live to fix the major problems. Let's hope that happens, because there is still a lot of potential here, and if EA steps up to the plate and fixes what's broken, it will be an easy game to recommend -- the pieces are in place, they just aren't put together, yet. Truth is, right now you're paying 60 bucks to be a glorified beta tester.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.