July 27th, 2009

The leap that NCAA has done from the 09 to the 10th of this year is quite irrelevant

In the field of football gaming there was a time when “Madden” took control over “NCAA” kingdom of the most favored US games – football - in regard to better graphics and gameplay, but lately, “NCAA Football 10” seems to gain supremacy again considering the quality of the game. Improved with new interesting additions NCAA Football 10 delivers a touch of familiarity to the gamers, though in the end it doesn’t prove to be all that consistent.

A new feature is introduced by the ‘Season Showdown’ mode that links your profile to the one of a particular college team. This link allows you, thanks to Season showdown mode, to keep track over every decision and action you make while handling all the modes present in the game, at the same time awarding points for the college you have previously chosen to play and credits the good sportsmanship for your team.

Another interesting thing is the living leader-board of all the nationals 120 NCAA football teams that displays every player’s contribution in a huge pool of competition, for in the end of the real-life season, the first 32 teams to dispute their abilities in order to compete in a tournament that decides the Season Showdown team-champion. This constant statistic that is tracked across the modes of the game reveals to be a good idea, though it is only a passive trait of the game, the game’s action relying mostly on playing the game in three types: dynasty, exhibition and Road to Glory.

The old Campus Legend mode is back under the name of Road to Glory featuring live-action cut-scenes with the main character, Erin Andrews, a reporter superfluously added in the display of the game. Next to other new elements unimportant to the game’s dynamic, there still is a problem which previously existed in Campus Legend mode: the annoying effort to get your player from the status of a practice performance to the one of actually lining up for the start. Even after you are there, at the starting line up, you still miss some positions that you might have otherwise preferred to the few viable existing ones.

To create a team with this new game’s release you can do it with the help of EA’s Team builder site which enables you to ‘edit’ players and custom uniforms and logos in a an endless list pf possibilities. But creating your team according to your own desires may seem useless as long as you have to play on a stadium that looks like Horseshoe Ohio, for instance. But either way, the play out there in the field looks real enough and there is the feature of a play-calling screen that informs you about some strategies needed to be taken in regard to defense or other actions you foresee to make in the dynamic of the play.

Apart from these features there are some interferences during the play, such as a clock that is rather bugging while it announces the end of the halves together with some commentaries that don’t have any connection whatsoever with the actions going on on the filed. All in one, the leap that NCAA has done from the 09 to the 10th of this year is quite irrelevant, letting us hope that for the next NCAA Football 11 there will be indeed consistent additions made to comprise also better on-field presentation.