NFL Street 2

Cynical or inspirational? I think you know the answer...

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EA seem to have dominated the sports scene since Stone Age man first kicked a stone between two trees. Every twelve months or so there's a new incarnation of each sporting franchise that they control. This is to say, every sport under the sun excluding tiddly-winks. Slick, noisy, repetitive, pointless, cynical and popular, these are all words which have been used to describe EA's sporting output. One word that has never been positively connected to these games is soulful. It's as if there's a special Souldfinder General position in EA corporate HQ, a wicked person who sucks all the life and passion out of developing titles, turning their mana into more megabucks in a wicked machine, no doubt devised by someone in marketing called Kain.

Well the Soulfinder General has done a thorough job with NFL Street 2. As have the accountants, as you can quickly tell that not an extra cent more than they considered was necessary was spent on development. For EA this is a shockingly poorly presented game. It's as if they have decided to even drop that pretence towards distinction. Some of the screens wouldn't have looked out of place on an early PS1 title. Of course the music is licensed out of the wazoo; whoever heads EA's music department certainly knows their stuff and can do a corporate deal with the best of them. And while some Nick Cave would certainly be out of place here, it would however be nice to hear something other than angry dissatisfied youth music. And I ain't saying that as an older guy, I hated this kind of soulless exploitative crap when I was a teenager just as much as the next individual. Still, there are some passable tunes in the game which do go along well with the action.

I don't know how long ago it was that some EA marketing bod came up with the wheeze of extracting more money from consumer-land by warping their 'simulation' games into a more urban environment, creating the Street series of games. What Street means is that all your players will look like rejects from the animators of the Hulk Hogan cartoon series, the music will be 'gritty' and 'urban' and the gameplay will be a seriously cut down version of the corporate affairs that spectators pay inflated sums of money to experience. How different NFL Street 2 is to its predecessor I have no idea. I can imagine that, apart from the music tracks and the team rosters and hot-spots, (knock an opponent into one of these and you increase your Gamebreaker score and unlock stuff) not very. What you do get is a team of only a handful of players, with no substitutes, no clock, no ref, a minimal play book and a bunch of special 'rad' moves to piss about with. NFL Street 2 essentially combines the tenets of football with the attitude of a beat-em-up, making it a hybrid game that offers up a very different gameplay experience to those serious football games. The aforementioned Gamebreaker can be quite amusing. Rack up enough style points and you can invoke the Gamebreaker. During the Gamebreaker your players are nearly invincible, which usually means an overwhelmingly successful play will go down.

While many would level the accusation that even at the best of times EA games are not accurate representatives of the sports they proclaim to portray, NFL Street 2 takes the pure essence of American football away from all the seriousness of the official game and turns into something that those with little more than a passing interest in the sport may enjoy. If they are pissed up and playing with a group of mates that is. Sure, there's a single player game, with a range of modes like Own the City, where you have to take out all the punks ass teams one by one until you face off against Xzibit's all-star NFL team for the crown. There's a variant on the career mode that could offers hours of play if you find the game mechanics suitably engaging. There's also a Gauntlet mode which pits you against all the NFL teams and four on four showdowns for a gaming experience even more akin to a fighting game.

All I really know is that the single player experience is something you have to put a fair amount of effort into to get a sparse amount of enjoyment back. There's just no life to the game, you can tell this was one of those titles developed in one of EA's sweat-shop environments, and that any love for their creation those working on it might have had has been thoroughly exorcised during meetings with middle management. I generally don't have a huge problem with EA and their constant recycling of games, as I very rarely buy one, but in this case it is depressing to witness the sheer corporate wasteland that can result from such a publishing ethos. There is the kernel of a good game buried underneath all the cynicism, and this really only becomes apparent when the game is played with some friends. An hour or two with a friend playing a couple of games was enjoyable enough. After the initial bewilderment as to what was going on subsided, we managed to have a reasonably good time. With four friends round one morning after a night out, the game came into its own. Of course the fact it was about 5 in the morning with the appropriate level of alcohol consumption was no doubt instrumental in our high levels of enjoyment.

So to summarise, NFL Street 2 is yet another example of the dangers of one publishing company gaining a monopoly over a particular genre. The experience becomes homogenised and the resulting games become soulless products devoid of any indication. It is also a prime candidate for one of the most soulless games that will appear in 2005. But it does have a mildly diverting single player component, and offers up a respectable amount of fun if you have enough friends and alcohol to hand. I couldn't really recommend purchasing this at full price, but if you can find it at a cut price and want something to add to your stack of party games, then it you could do worse.

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By Sam Gibson