Less than a year after the release of EA's last venture into the arcade football genre, the prolific publisher has already produced a sequel in NFL Street 2. While NFL Street 2 is every bit as slick of a product as you'd expect from EA's sports division, it's only marginally improved over its predecessor. This iteration has only made a scant few changes to the gameplay, and it really does very little to correct any of the flaws present in last year's--er, make that this past January's game.

No, your electronic calendar isn't on the fritz. NFL Street 2 has actually arrived a mere 11 months after its predecessor.

As far as gameplay is concerned, NFL Street hasn't changed much over the past 11 months. All the fundamentals, including the style moves, simplified playbooks, and gamebreakers, are back again just as they were before. The biggest change comes in the form of wall moves. These are basically stylish jukes and jumps that can be performed simply by pressing the style-move button and the corresponding juke or jump button while running near a wall. Wall jukes give you a little more spin or bounce as you move past a defender, and wall jumps simply let you leap over the defense. There are also a series of hotspots set across each of the game's stages, where, by performing wall jumps and jukes specifically into them, you'll get a humongous style-point bonus. However, if the defense gets to you first and tackles you into one of these hotspots, they'll get their own bonus.

Outside of wall moves, there's also a new type of gamebreaker move, aptly titled the gamebreaker 2. Now you actually have two gamebreaker meters to fill as you pull off all your nifty little style moves. If you fill the first one up, you can press the appropriate button and send your team into gamebreaker mode for the usual span of a single drive. However, if you hold off and let the second meter build on top of that one, you can do a gamebreaker 2. This move actually wrests control away from you for a brief period and transfers into a cutscene, where, regardless of whether you're on offense or defense, your players will pull off some manner of insane maneuver to get the ball to the end zone. Of course, the standard gamebreakers pretty much guaranteed that your team would score, so now this new gamebreaker simply eliminates any of that doubt.

While both the new wall moves and the new gamebreaker move are neat ideas, they also conspire to unbalance the gameplay. Specifically, the gigantic style-point bonuses you can get by hitting hotspots lets you fill up your gamebreaker meters extremely quickly. This means that unless you're super adept at playing defense, chances are you'll run into at least a few gamebreakers per game, if not more. And odds are you probably aren't super adept at defense, since the defensive portion of this game, just like the first, is mostly an afterthought. The gamebreaker 2 almost seems like the developer's attempt to try to counterbalance this, in that it gives you a reason not to just push the gamebreaker button every single time it pops up. We even ran into a few games where we were able to get a pair of gamebreaker 2s before all was said and done, and we did so without much duress.

Wall moves provide big style bonuses, and they also make the game significantly easier.

Of course, with that said, NFL Street 2 is still a fun game to play despite its imbalances. The action is just as fast paced and over the top as ever, and there's a host of new content to play through, including the old favorites, such as the pickup game and the NFL challenge mode. The NFL challenge mode still operates under mostly the same premise: You take a team of nobody players and put them through a series of challenges against major NFL teams. These challenges might entail beating a team in a game to 24 by only running the ball or by intercepting the ball a certain number of times against a tough passing team. By completing these challenges, you'll earn character-upgrade points for your players that will turn them into an elite street football squad. The difference here is that all of the challenges are played under the guise of a "training period" prior to a tournament against the cream of the NFL crop. You're given 150 days to train your team, and each time a challenge is completed, days are subtracted from your training time. The good news is that you'll have more than enough chances to boost your squad to the hilt before that 150-day countdown ends; the bad news is that it's still a wholly arduous process to do so. Part of the problem with this mode in the game's previous version was that it was terribly long and very frustrating, and that problem still hasn't been fixed here.

There's also a whole other single-player mode in NFL Street 2 called "own the city." Here, you'll create one player and then find yourself face to face with none other than Street 2 cover boy and Pimp My Ride host Xzibit. X-to-the-Z is basically your trainer in this mode, as he introduces you to the world of "underground" street football. Once you pass his exceedingly brief tutorial, you're given the chance to play a number of pickup games and specialized minigames against a bunch of other scrub players. Technically, this works much the same way as in the NFL challenge mode, in that you'll be traveling around, running your way through all the different locations on the map, and eventually "owning" them by beating all the challenges. However, again, just like the NFL challenge mode, it's another semiarduous affair and one that's actually less interesting than the NFL challenge, since you're just playing against randomly generated guys, rather than against actual players.