Bill Abner's Review

[Bill_Abner]

Quote: Originally Posted by CrossTown

Agreed with everything, except for his final grade. I don't know his grading scale but the strides the NCAA team has made with this franchise's gameplay warrants at least a B+, regardless of the dynasty issues. When we consider the tuning they intend to do, as well as the upcoming patch, I can say this game will be as good as it could ever really be. Not without it flaws, but close.

Difficult game to assign a final grade. (I hate 'grading' games to begin with, really.)

But B, B+, does it really matter? It's hard to give the game too high an initial score because Dynasty mode has serious long term (even short term) issues, and it's easily the meatiest feature in the entire game.

That said, if they patch this part as intended it's easily an "A" range game. NCAA surprised the hell out of me this year.

[choadler]

Quote: Originally Posted by Bill_Abner

Difficult game to assign a final grade. (I hate 'grading' games to begin with, really.) But B, B+, does it really matter? It's hard to give the game too high an initial score because Dynasty mode has serious long term (even short term) issues, and it's easily the meatiest feature in the entire game. That said, if they patch this part as intended it's easily an "A" range game. NCAA surprised the hell out of me this year.

It is as you said in the review. This game almost deserves 2 grades. The gameplay is so good on the field that I could see just playing the first season with a different teams (cupcake, powerhouse, middle tier program). But the playing a dynasty really longer than probably 2 years does not sound attractive to me at this point. If they get recruits and CPU recruiting logic and roster management issues fixed, this game gets an A.

Good review by the way.

[jfsolo]

Reviewing sports games these days is a tough, tough gig. They have to review the game out of the box, but we here all know that the "real" game isn't seen until after the second patch, and now we're going to have LTP's thrown into the mix.

You really just have see if the reviewer was factually accurate, thorough in their exploration of all of the elements of the game, and without an obvious agenda/bias.

Somebody has got to do it, but I'm glad its not me.