Some things just go perfectly together. For example: peanut butter and jelly, Batman and Robin, Mario and Luigi; the list goes on and on. The NBA and a street attitude have worked well for EA in the past as well; last year’s NBA Street Volume 2 was easily one of the more enjoyable sports games both for sports aficionados and neophytes alike. (Heck, I can’t watch basketball on television for more than five minutes without instinctively reaching for the remote, and even I enjoyed it.) Unfortunately, this is not a review of NBA Street, which makes sense, but of NFL Street 2, which, at least at first, makes less sense.
The general concept of NFL Street 2 is the same as its predecessor and inspired by the NBA Street games. You take real NFL players and put them in games of street football where there are barely any rules but lots of showboating, and entertainment ensues. What results is a stripped-down, arcade-style football game for the player who doesn’t care about formations and strategy as much as they do about simply scoring touchdowns and beating the hell out of the ball carrier. If you’re a football purist and it sounds like this game will offend your sensibilities, chances are it will, because you are not the target audience.
Unlike traditional football, NFL Street 2 features teams of seven who play both offense and defense (and forget about special teams altogether; the only thing getting kicked in this game is a copious amount of ass). To start, you pick from a pool of players at a variety of positions, either from real NFL teams or generic neighborhood ballers. (There is also a decent create-a-player function available if that kind of thing suits your fancy.) These players will be assigned to positions for you on both sides of the ball; while preference will obviously be given to a player’s natural position, the game does make some curious choices sometimes, like leaving receivers on the offensive line while sending defensive backs out to catch the ball.
The games themselves are not timed; they continue until one team scores a certain number of touchdowns, with extra points and two-point conversions handled via five- and ten-yard plays following a touchdown, respectively. In addition to points on the scoreboard, players can score style points by showing off and performing flashy maneuvers during plays; earning enough style points will net a Gamebreaker, which is exactly what it sounds like. Essentially, a Gamebreaker makes a team virtually unstoppable for the duration of one drive; offensive players plow through tackles effortlessly, and defensive players steamroll the ball carrier, often causing a fumble or just grabbing the ball from his hands. New this year is the Gamebreaker 2, which is accumulated after gaining enough style points for a second Gamebreaker without using the first. The Gamebreaker 2 gives a custom animation of an unbelievable play, along with the aforementioned invincibility. Unfortunately, the custom animation is pretty much the only reason to save for a Gamebreaker 2, since the vanilla Gamebreaker is so powerful just by itself.
The other new addition to the gameplay is the incorporation of walls. Basically, the fields are now walled in, and there are opportunities to perform style moves off of them in order to earn extra style points. For example, the QB can leap off a wall for extra height on a pass, the receiver can jump off the wall to get extra height for a catch, and the running back can hurdle off the wall to get extra height for evading defensive players. These moves are actually pretty cool as well as practical, so this is a good addition to the system. One thing I noticed that goes along with this, however, is that using style moves is considerably less likely to cause a fumble in NFL Street 2 than it was in the original. That’s either positive or negative, depending on how you look at it (and what side of the ball you’re on, ultimately).
NFL Street 2 provides a number of modes to play with, but they all ultimately feel the same after a while. There’s the standard Pickup Game, where you pick players from an NFL team and play players from another NFL team, and the associated NFL Gauntlet, where you pick one team and try to beat the other 31. NFL Challenge is basically a kind of franchise mode, where the game gives you a set amount of time to build a group of scrubs into game shape to take on an NFL team in an exhibition game. There are also mini-games based on the standard gameplay, like Jump Ball Battle, which challenges you to catch as many passes as you can, and Crush the Carrier, which is a “street” take on the old schoolyard classic Kill the Man With the Ball.
The real meat of the game is Own the City mode, which is similar to NBA Street Volume 2’s “Be a Legend” mode. You start off by challenging local players in pick-up games and mini-game challenges, building up your team by assimilating one of the losers, and then taking that team to challenge the next team. However, I got very frustrated with this mode, because there is no easy way to compare all the players you have to choose from (and especially the players they might replace) on the same screen, so a lot of team building is guesswork. Plus, thanks to the rubber-band AI, it seems like you never really have a fair chance to win the games in order to move on; when you finally do, then it seems to be by pure luck or the benevolence of the game, and not by skill alone.
On the whole, though, the game just gets repetitive and uninteresting after the initial street gimmick wears off. The game mainly feels arbitrary, like your efforts really don’t figure too far into whether the play succeeds or fails. Part of that is due to the aforementioned rubber band AI, which turns your players from superhuman to scrubs in the course of a single game, and is far from subtle about it. The bigger issue, though, is that the game simply gets repetitive. There is a very limited assortment of plays, as is to be expected, but that leads to a limited number of options and, by extension, a limited amount of variety. After a good few hours with NFL Street 2, I felt like I’d seen more or less all there was to see.
The control is decent, but it seems needlessly complicated for an arcade-style football game. Most of the complication comes into play on offense, where there are a plethora of options for evasive maneuvers (hurdle, stiff-arm, juke, etc), most of which are sensitive to how long you hold down the button. I actually had trouble getting through the tutorial, because every time I tried to juke, I would hold the button down too long and end up spinning. In my opinion, once you start relying on length of button presses, you have way too many options. In fact, a game like this that’s not intended for hardcore football players should really have one button for evasive maneuvers, and determine which move is the most appropriate. I appreciate that the designers tried to give the player lots of control over the ball carrier, but it’s overwhelming in its implementation, and doubly so for players who aren’t used to football games.
Graphically, NFL Street 2 is serviceable, but won’t win any awards. The players seem to be drawn from several generic face types, as very few of the Street players look like their real life counterparts; just as an example, the portraits of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are nearly identical, and those two gentlemen look almost nothing alike. The style animations are fairly well done, as one would expect, and the animations for the wall moves are the best of the lot, often appearing quite dynamic. Unfortunately, since most of the arenas are quite dark, without adjusting your brightness up considerably, you’d never know that there was some cool stuff going on.
Sound is also nothing to write home about. There is some overacted voice content in NFL Street, and apparently, every player in the game shares the same exact voice, which is a bit jarring. When you hear five different players deliver the same exact line in the same voice, it does something to disrupt the suspension of disbelief that a game such as this relies upon. The soundtrack isn’t much better, with a collection of angry rock and hip-hop tracks that just aren’t much fun to listen to. There are some exceptions, like tracks from Sum 41 and Papa Roach, but for every one of those, there are songs like one that seems to just consist of the lead singer shouting "I wanna be RESPECTED!" over and over again. Thankfully, the Xbox’s Custom Soundtracks are available in NFL Street 2, but there is, inexplicably, a limit on the total number of tracks you can have at any given time. I’ve never seen a game that implements Custom Soundtracks that limits how many tracks you can listen to, and I honestly can’t think of a legitimate reason why such a feature would exist.
In all, NFL Street 2 is an excellent rental, perhaps as something to play during the Super Bowl halftime show (assuming you’re not going to be on the lookout for further “wardrobe malfunctions”, that is). However, there simply just isn’t enough substance here to justify a purchase, even for the novice football player. If you’re really looking for a football fix, just go ahead and buy ESPN NFL 2K5 instead; you’ll get a more complete package and the game will stand the test of time much, much better.
