NFL Street 2 Unleashed Updated Hands-On

NFL Street games have been multiplying like rabbits of late. We had two entries in the stylish football series in 2004 alone. Later this month, a PSP-specific version of the second NFL Street will be making its way to the Sony handheld, just in time for launch day. We recently got our hands on Unleashed to see how it differs from the console counterpart on which it's based.

As you might expect from the title alone, NFL Street 2 Unleashed looks and feels a lot like the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube versions of NFL Street 2. This is most obvious in the visual style of the game's player models, menus, and loading screen artwork. Essentially, it seems that Unleashed has been shrunken down to handheld size with most all of the console's visual bells and whistles intact. Game speed has noticeably improved since our last look at the game, and if the player models aren't necessarily as detailed as in the console versions, you probably won't notice because it moves so smoothly.

Another similarity between Unleashed and Street 2 for console? The presence of Xzibit, naturally. While X-to-the-Z is featured in the game's training mode, he doesn't lend his voice to the proceedings as he did in the console versions. The training mode takes you through the basics, such as running and passing, as well as the finer points of style and defensive controls. You have the ability to go through the entire tutorial, check out only the new stuff, or skip the tutorials altogether.

The same career mode that graced NFL Street 2 is also found here in Unleashed. Dubbed "own the city," this mode will find you creating a player from scratch, assigning him a position of choice, and proceeding to defeat rival teams from around the fictional urban setting of the game. We didn't have much time to delve deeply into this mode, but, on the surface at least, it appears quite similar to that found on consoles.

The PSP version of NFL Street 2 ups the ante in terms of minigames. Whereas the console versions of the game had only a handful of pigskin-themed diversions, Unleashed features nine minigames, all of which can be played by multiple gamers via the handheld's wireless multiplayer capabilities. The games range from the familiar crush the carrier, open field showdown, and jump-ball battle, to slightly more in-depth games, such as the more challenging two-minute drill (whereby you score as many points as you can in two minutes and then attempt to stop your opponent from besting your total during his or her allotted 120 seconds). Then there's the truly weird, such as the style standoff, essentially a dance competition between two NFL stars where you are asked to mimic the moves of your opponent using the PSP's directional pad. The street slalom will find your NFL baller running through the back alleys of an urban environment, leaping over obstacles as he goes. The four-on-four minigame is intriguing if only because it opens up the already score-happy Street style of NFL play even more. Finally, seven of the minigames found in Unleashed will be available in party play mode, a feature that allows up to four players to pass around a single PSP while trying to best one another's scores.

NFL Street 2 Unleashed seems like a good fit for a handheld, if only because the quick nature of the seven-on-seven matches and minigames translates easily to the PSP's gaming-on-the-go nature. Even though there are long loading times right now (hopefully to be cleared up once Unleashed hits retail), it's nice to know that nearly everything you've grown to like about the console version will be found here, just in miniaturized form. Expect to see a full review of NFL Street 2 Unleashed when the game is released later this month.