One of the driest sports games I've played in years.
The game starts with a cut scene of an animated Blake Griffin dunking over a generic defender. When I saw this I thought "Wow EA is finally bringing back their pre game videos". Do you remember the good ol' days in Madden and NCAA March Madness on the PS2 where once you start up the game, it would have a player, fan, or cheerleader who would say "EA Sports, It's in the game!"? It was cool because you saw a different person saying it each time, and it was an exciting way to start playing a game. Well this is nothing like it. That Blake Griffin clip is cool maybe the first three times, but you can't skip it. So by the 100th time you turned on the game, you still have to watch that same 15 second clip. Well I guess this really doesn't have much to do with the game, but it foreshadows what's to come.
So after the cutscene, you see a generic student that you can move around, and shoot on a generic college campus. It's really nothing different than the feature they added to the main menu of NBA Live 06. The menu once you hit start is nothing fancy.
I finally start the game and I am fairly surprised. The presentation is sweet! They finally have two broadcast stations (CBS and ESPN). This was awesome at first, but I found myself constantly choosing the ESPN broadcast over the CBS one because the commentary in the CBS one is so dry and disapointing. Plus, hearing Dick Vitale go crazy never gets old. The other thing I want to say about the presentation is that the arenas look very nice, and FINALLY EA sports spent time making the crowds look realistic. There are now school logos on the fans shirts which I thought was cool. Plus for the first time, your arena doesn't always fill up to full capacity automatically. For example if you have a game Sam Houston State vs. American then the bleachers might be mostly empty.
The gameplay....is pretty pathetic. Big men can not dribble the ball to save their lives. The concept of that is realistic, but this game over exaggerates that too an extreme. NCAA Basketball 10 has a lot to do with controlling the pace which can get very boring if your team is a slow paced team. As for overall gameplay, it's a little rough but passable.
The main problem with the gameplay though, is the final score. If you keep the time set to the default setting, then you will be playing 10 minute halves. That seems like it would be perfect, but with the whole "Controlling the pace" concept, you tend to get low final scores like 30-28. How am i supposed to get players to the all-american team if my leading scorer averages 6 points a game? The best way to fix this problem is to set the timer to 20 minute halves. But then the problem with that is that the game's last way too long. This is a huge problem I have with the game that's tough to overcome.
This game really struggles with depth. In fact, it really doesn't have any. Let me go through the features:
Creation Zone- To all you College Hoops 2k fans, don't get too excited. This is possibly one of the biggest let downs. In creation zone, you can create a player (Not a new feature in the slightest), Edit a player (That's a feature? Woo hoo I can type in the names of the thousands of players that are in the game), and Edit a coach (Not that impressive). That's it. There's no Create a School. There's no Create a Chant. There's no...creativity.
Player Update Hub- This is where you can download the newest player rankings and new updates, but the funny thing is that I downloaded it and nothing about my game changed. North Carolina is still the best team in the game, even though they are piss poor in real life. Kentucky's John Wall is the best player in the NCAA in real life, but in the game, he's still just got a rating of 82. I'm pretty sure this feature is garbage.
Rivalry mode- Once you first turn on the game, you can set your favorite team. Then, it'll alert you if another player is online who has their favorite team set as your rival team. So if i set my favorite team as Michigan, then it'll tell me if any Ohio State fans are online, and you can play them by just pressing the right analog stick. This is kinda a cool feature, but they didn't really think outside the box on this one, plus it probably only took them all of five minutes too make this feature.
Dynasty mode- The exact mode you expect. Choose a team, play their schedule, go to the tournament, recruit, repeat. Although it's a fun mode, I've seen better dynasty modes done in College Hoops 2k7 and 2k8. But, it's the only feature in the game that's worth buying the game for, but even then it's nothing new.
That's it, that's all the modes/features. I agree that game modes don't matter that much if the gameplay can make up for it, but the gameplay falls short too. This game is just an overall dissapointment, and it'll be at least another two years until this series is worth picking up again