Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

I play football games. Plain in simple. From Atari to the 360, it's always been my thing. This game is simply on two different sides of the same prizm. On one hand, the gameplay has changed and they made a somewhat ambitious attempt to make gameplay more fluid. As today's technology has showed me- they could have likely added a 9.99 download to NCAA 12 and gave us the same improvements and called this NCAA 12.1. Notice how I began this review. I say that only to say this... Still telling me to press Y to make a catch and how to operate hot routes during the loading screens is only beginning to piss me off. This game is so stuck on mediocrity. They make the running game a little more difficult this year. This isn't done by having a smart CPU AI that adapts to your playcalling and tendacies, this is done by having full backs completely blowing blocking assignments and defensive linemen pulling off their blocks the moment the play takes a direction. Cornerbacks on the opposite side of the field who are jamming recieves to the outside somehow sniffing out the run play and pulling off recievers. It's absolutely frustrating. The running animations still look a little off at times and the ball still floats out of the quarterbacks hand. Player clipping still exist and coaches are still absent from the sidelines. Wyoming does have brown helmets though. The field goal net still bounces balls when kicked and those goaline flags still fly out of the ground when slightly kicked. You still get sucked into blocks as shown by my blitzing linebacker having an open lane to the running back and still running past him to engage in a lineman who was behind the running back. Quarterback dodging is there but it works very random. I appreciate the quarterback footwork in the pocket. The tackling is better but it's simply a cleaned up version of last years. Nothing drastic. This game is just that - Nothing drastic. Safe and unambitious. A slight upgrade from last year. Not necessarily worth 60 bucks but being that I traded in Madden and NCAA 12, I paid less. I could have gone another year without this product if it meant NCAA 14 would have been a great upgrade. I was content with NCAA 12. I am unfortunately a football head who would have found it difficult to bypass a new football game that had some changes to what I was playing. Is this game better than 12? Of course. The gap between this game and 12 is much more narrow than the gap between 11 and 12. I am still waiting for the day when I can say EA has finally outdid what they did for the old xbox or for the day when I can close the door on NFL 2K5.