Despite others' high praise, I can only give NCAA 10 3 stars. There are several reasons, but chief among them is the overall lack of a strong sense of the college football experience. The college atmosphere, where student athletes make their fellow football crazed classmates go crazy in the stands is completely void. It's as if EA purposefully put all those college kids on some kind of drug that keeps them from showing emotion. For instance, when your team scores a game winning touchdown, the players from both teams just slowly walk around the field like zombies, with no sense of victory or loss. It's like the kids don't care if they win or lose. And I think that's how the dev team felt about their own offering.
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<br />I simply cannot support any product that is built so carelessly, full of release day bugs, and incomplete team rosters. NCAA 09 marked a decent leap forward in playability, but they just copy/pasted last year's game over for this year, despite a few boring animations.
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<br />Lastly, I know I'm in the minority here, but I prefer playing this game's RPG style mode, Campus Legend (needlessly renamed "Road To Glory"). The video reporting Erin Andrews does gets real old, real fast and adds nothing to the experience. EA (not Erin) did manage to model a cheap 3D dorm room for your college stud football player, but it adds no functionality over NCAA 09's calendar/menu setup. More pointless fluff. The mode also suffers from a geriatric practice mode that becomes utterly useless once you're the starter. The coach play calling is remarkably mindless as well (he calls for outside runs where they will never work).
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<br />EA has also managed to ruin trying to run outside against the genius monsters call defensive ends. Your offensive tackles, in contrast, are timid morons. Yes, EA took out the mid-air pirouette rocket interceptions we saw in 09, but that's not enough...
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<br />Enjoy it where you can, but I'm telling you, save your time for Madden and NHL 10.
goalieump (member since 2007)
reviewed on 8/5/09