Tyler Gaffney

3 stars is generous - but I'm a sucker for nostalgia and just playing an ncaa game again is exciting. So far have only played road to glory so this review is not fully baked. But what I've noticed so far: Starting with the positives. One of the things that would get really boring in the old games was the practices because it was just full team reps over and over again. They've added some interesting practice types and you get to choose each week. So that's neat. But admittedly these too get a little dull after a while. Another positive is the game physics - I know some folks are noting that it's clunky (and they're correct), but as somebody who basically quit playing football games after NCAA got discontinued, this feels like a huge improvement. And the gameplay is generally as fun as the old NCAAs. Now the negatives: Road to glory is just completely devoid of the charm of the NCAA road to the heisman or whatever it was called. For instance in the old one, you'd create a player, and then you'd create a highschool team for them to play their last season at. Based on their performance, you'd have better or worse prospects. that just... doesn't exist. You now just make your player, decide what star level prospect they are, and just pick your team. Pretty lame honestly. That's the most major thing, but then just overall, it feels very mechanical - like not a lot of little fun things from the past games. For instance in the last game the season felt much more structured - you'd have some pre-season things to do, regular season games had a little more excitement - the regular season games are all the same it feels like - like there's nothing that greatly distinguishes a week 1 tune up game from a end of season rivalry game - you just kind of go through the paces. And something that bugs me is the end of the season. The heisman is just presented as a minor notification. Like a slightly fancier load screen. Post season games are really just extensions of regular season games. you just advance from the last week of the season, and the next week is a bowl game but identical to the regular season. Even the natty is just presented as another week. And when you finish the natty, is there some animation? A trophy presentation? Nope. How about seeing the final season standings, seeing what players are leaving, what's your team going to look like next season? Nope. You hit advance week and boom, the next week you see is week 1 of the next season. The only thing that is different is you get a brief screen that asks if you'd like to transfer or if you'd like to declare for the draft. If you select no, it just roles right into the next season. It's just dull. Now just for the more technical annoyances: Glitchy as hell. Feels unfinished in a lot of ways. The player creation is pretty cool, but completely unorganized (i.e., head templates, accessories, helmets) Way too many cut screens, and only skippable with hold-A/X. so in the middle of games you'll get done with a play and then see a somewhat lengthy cut scene that takes a moment to skip. Kind of just takes you out of the game. So some of these are more minor - but overall it's an unfinished game, lacking a lot of the charm that made the old games great. Hopefully some updates will be able to bring this back up to snuff.