NFL Tour (Xbox 360) Review

Posted by Jordan Williams on 02.02.2008

Vitals

Genre	Simulation
System	Xbox 360, PC
Release Date	Q0 0000

EA tries to reinvent it's successful NFL Street franchise but only ends up ruining it.

It's not big secret that if there is an official NFL game to be made, EA is going to make it. They have had a wide range of success with the legendary Madden NFL series and they had wonderful success with the arcade offshoot NFL Street. Sure, they get a lot of complaints about not switching up the formula every year but usually it could be chalked up to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

Well, this is what happens when they try to fix something that ain't broke.

NFL Tour is an 'upgrade' of the NFL Street Franchise, I say upgrade loosely because what this game does to the NFL Street legacy is hardly anything than an upgrade, and in fact it's almost the exact opposite. NFL Tour does away with the urban setting and landscapes for NFL Street for a 'Fan Fest' sort of look that hits every hotspot in America in a walled in almost Arena Football type setting. The game breakers, big hits, and over the top action are all severely subdued, and there's one thing and one thing alone that makes this game truly unplayable, but I'll get to that later.

The game asks you when you first pop it in if you are ready for The Tour, well. I don't think anyone will ever be ready for this.


Graphics

NFL Tour's graphics surely aren't anything to write home about. They ditched the over muscled and over the top style of NFL Street for a more quasi realistic style, but all it does it makes every player look almost a like from the back. Once you actually see the players up close you can start to pick out small little differences such as Ronde Barber's face and Eli Brady's smug little smile, but other than that everything else is cookie cutter generic. You get the option to create your own player on your favorite team, but the customize options are pitiful. You can only change your skin tone, head type, and weight setting. All of which end up making you look as generic as humanly possible.

The Arenas you play in were never a big high point of the official NFL games, but on Street they actually made a difference and showed up the stark changes from the franchise. In Tour they are all but gone, sure there are 9 different arenas to play in, but you honestly will never be able to tell. They all look almost exactly the same outside of a few poorly placed landmarks in the background to remind you that you are in New York or New Orleans, most of which you never see anyway.

All in all, the graphics don't impress, although they probably weren't meant to impress anyone anyway. The game hardly ever slows down unintentionally and there's never any stuttered or clipping. So in that sense I guess it's okay, but other than that this game looks like an Xbox game being played on a 360 rather than a true next gen title.


Gameplay

Oh man, where to begin. The game hypes itself up as a football game that does away with the complicated buttons and instead ops for a simpler approach. In a sense, it works. Passing is now only regulated to the A and B buttons rather than having every receiver mapped to a single button. This is a double edged blade. On one hand you always know when you hit A, the ball is going to let fly at SOMEONE, but on the other hand, hitting B does not instantly chuck the ball at another receiver. B simply toggles who is the "A" receiver. Not knowing this can cause you MANY a sack in the first few games, especially due to the piss poor AI and play selection.

Another new addition to the game is a button mashing aspect of breaking tackles. You no longer have to actually try to find a route to outrun and pass defenders, now if you are quick enough to can just button mash passed them and break 6 or so tackles in the first place, leaving the defensive side of the game to be a complete joke. Wall hurdles, jukes, and fancy spins are all still here, but nothing on the level of the stunts you had in Street.

Defense in this game is a pure joke. You only have a handful of plays and only a few of those are effective. You will spend most of the game blitzing because those seem to be the only plays that do what they are intended to do. One big plus is that the 'Smash Meter', tours version of the Game breaker, can only be accessed on DEFENSE. The bad part is you never really get a true sense of actually building up said smash meter. You can easily go a whole game playing hard and it never flashes, where as in some games after a few tackles you are ready to smash someone. It's very inconsistent and at the end of the day very useless. Defense can also deliver big hits that have the power to knock the ball carrier back a few yards, but more often than not, the computer will use this hits at the complete wrong time and end up pushing the ball carrier into the first down or worse, into the touchdown.

As noted above, the play selection in the game is bad at BEST. You can easily win every single game using two or three plays on offense , most of them being passes since the games clunky ground controls lead your ball carrier to break a tackle and run backwards FAR to often to be playable, resulting in MANY failed 1 or 2 point conversions. You are even awarded an achievement for calling the same play four times in a row, the first of MANY easy achievements in this game.

The game has a 'Tour' mode in which you create yourself and add yourself to any of the pro teams and compete in the actual tour. This is pretty much a bare boned season mode with objectives. At first, you simply have to win the game, but in the next tier, you may have to score 24 points to win, then the tier after that the opponent may start with 7 points and you have to come from behind to win. These little things keep the game from getting too boring, but most of them are so easy that it won't matter at the end of the day.

You also get two small minigames to play with: Smash and Dash, a simple game where you try to hold onto the ball the longest while running away from the other players who want to take it from you. And Redzone Rush, a 1 on 1 battle between players to score as many touchdowns as they can against each other. Both are fun for the first few times though, but you'll never come back to them after you've beaten them once.

This game completely lost it's sense of style and everything that made it unique, it' almost seems like the type of game you'd drop a couple of quarters in at the arcade and fool around with for a bit, but it's definitely not anything you'd want to play with for more than a few hours. Hell, you probably won't even play it for that long unless you turn the some of the sound options off...


Sound

Whomever in there right mind decided to let Trey Wingo be the announcer for this game needs to be dragged out back and stabbed in the eye with a firepoker. This is by far, the most annoying announcer ever in the history of video games. He just rambles on the ENTIRE GAME rarely ever calling the actual action of the game itself, instead he comments on the arena, the fans, the pizza he just ate, his completely unfunny and unexplained love for Earl Grey Tea, and worst of all, he will actually make jokes and reference at how repetitive his own commentary is.

Then he'll say the same joke again.

And again.

And again.

Then he'll repeat the same 20 lines of dialogue he seems to have in a vicious and hellish cycle.

If this was EA's sick attempt at trying to be funny, they failed HORRIBLY. I do NOT exaggerate when I say that if you do NOT turn the announcer off you will NOT play this game long enough to beat it. Do yourself a favor and turn it off before you even start playing, if you don't believe me, play just ONE game with him on and see how it feels.

The rest of the sound design isn't exactly a bed of roses either; the music is extremely low and almost always drowned out by Wingo's manic chatter. The actual games sounds themselves lack a bit due to the lack of helmets and pads. You are treated to explosion #1 for touch downs, explosion #2 for a big hit, and explosion #3 whenever they feel like it. Needless to say after a few games you will end up just streaming music from your computer or MP3 player to the Xbox Live's custom soundtrack, I know I did.


Lasting Appeal

This game is something you're gonna rent one day when there's nothing else left. You'll play it for about four hours and you'll have had all the fun there is to have with it. Lasting appeal isn't much; in fact the game doesn’t even make that good of use of its co-op. Four people can play on the same team but that makes the game so laughably easy that it's not even a challenge. Online play is limited to just 1 on 1 affair but to find someone else is a mixed blessing.

Sure, you've got someone to play with...but it also means that someone else out there is going through the same pain as you.

As for the achievements, they are all painfully easy, killing any sense of replay value you would have. There are only 14 of them and you can easily get over half of them in a single game. You won't be playing this for long.



Fun Factor

You'll have fun with this game for the first couple of games, after all that is said and done you'll be left wondering why EA decided to reinvent the wheel and ending up just turning it into a brick. The team AI is lame, the fun has been sucked out of the game due to its 'upgrades' and overall you just won't have much fun with it after it's all said and done. Just play the demo.

The 411

This is just another game in the long line of games that EA tried to re-invent. SSX on Tour, Def Jam: Icon, and now NFL Tour. This game tries to bring the fun and fast gameplay of NFL Street to the next generation, but instead manages to drop it down to worse than last gen. Don't buy it, don't rent it, don't think about it. If you want a good arcade NFL experience, this game just isn't for you.

Are you ready for the Tour?

A better question would be "Are you ready for Trade-In Credit?

Graphics	6.5	They get the job done, but they definitely aren't worthy of the 360's power.
Gameplay	5.0	Take everything that was good about NFL Street and break it.
Sound	3.0	Worst. Announcer. Ever. He single handedly brings down the whole game if left on.
Lasting Appeal	5.0	It's a weekend rental at best, and that's only if there's nothing else in the store.
Fun Factor	5.0	You'll have fun for the first couple of games, but after that you'll be wanting to find the nearest copy of Street.
Overall	4.5   [ Poor ]