"Abysmal"

Arena football. One of the gems in the sporting world. Arena football is a game that has deserved a good video game for a long time. With the hard hitting, high scoring, frantic pace of the sport, it has all the ingredients to make a great football game. When I heard that EA had started making a game for this sport, it seemed that my wishes for a good Arena Football game might be coming true. How wrong I was.

Graphics:
The graphics were decent, I noticed sometimes that the animations were choppy, but for the most part, everything looked nice. Nothing amazing, nothing too horrible. The graphics did capture the flare of the game, which is always a good thing. My only real problem with the graphics is how dark the Arenas were. I feel that being dark could have been a good thing, but it was just too dark for my tastes.

Control:
This is where I felt the game stumbled. The game plays really slow, and unresponsive controls only help to add to the frustration. When trying to select a play, I was often driven to frustration when having to hit the X button three and four times to even get it to select it. This is after the same amount of tries of hitting up or down trying to get to the play I wanted.

On the field, it was just as frustrating. On defense, when trying to switch players or make a tackle, it took countless tries of madly jamming on the button to even get it to respond. One of the few pluses I found though, was the passing system was almost flawlessly responsive. This was key to avoiding sacks time in and time out for me. One ray of light so far.

Presentation:
The presentation was great sometimes, other times it fell flat on its face. One example of the good and bad together is at the start of the game when the players are coming out onto the field. Everything is flashy, getting you geared up for the game, and all of a sudden it's over. It's like it was cut short for some odd reason. Next, the play books. Though they were very easy to use, I didn't like the way they had them set in a vertical bar. That was just very very annoying.

On the field screens were great sometimes. I loved it when I returned a field length interception for a touchdown, only to see my player's victory celebration cut short when a player from the opposing team come out of nowhere and knock him down. That was a great thing, but the others were cool the first time you saw them, but not the thirty other times you saw them throughout the length of one game. They did add flavor to the game, but without any variety in the dialogue, it got old real quick. In this game's defense though, most EA sports games tend to make you bored of the between play cut scenes.

Sound:
Well, what can I say, the sound is another hit and miss. The on field voices and sounds are great, and the arena sounds are enough to get your blood pumping. It all becomes dull once you hear the same voices saying the same things over and over until it feels like you are going to go crazy. Also, with no play-by-play announcing, all you are left to listen to is the same generic field announcer over and over. Not to mention that 90% of the voice actors that do the voices on the field are just absolutely horrible.

The soundtrack is one of the worst I've heard since NHL 2K6. It is filled with a lot of MTV sounding "punk" songs that utterly fail. It then feels the need to put horrid "nu" metal crap in there to finish out the nerve grating soundtrack. Oh, I almost forgot the pieces made for the game. Absolutely generic and uninspired music. I wouldn't wish this music on my worst enemy.

Overall:
For a game that had such high potential, EA figured out a way to blow it. From unresponsive controls, to uninspired presentation, to the bland sounds make this one to definitely utterly avoid or to at least give a rental before buying.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 02/21/06