Video Game Review: ‘NCAA Football 14’ Soldiers on with No Soul

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Average: 5 (1 vote)

CHICAGO - If you close your eyes and picture some of the iconic moments in gaming history, most of them involve some sort of personal touch. The fireworks when you beat a level in “Super Mario Brothers”, the first time you were attacked by dozens of chickens in “The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past”, hiding in a cardboard box in “Metal Gear Solid”, the “Lazlo” show in “Grand Theft Auto III” and probably whatever your personal favorite gaming moment is, all managed to connect with gamers on a level beyond simply ‘gaming’ - instead ingratiating themselves into our psyches via charm and character, remaining there forever. Heck, I bet most people’s most treasured memory of “Madden Football” on SNES and Genesis was the adorable little ambulance that would take the field when a player was injured. What I’m trying to say is that a little personality goes a long, long way, and when it comes to sports games, this is a lesson EA Sports needs to learn sooner rather than later.

HollywoodChicago.com Video Game Rating: 3.5/5.0
Video Game Rating: 3.5/5.0

Why? Because “NCAA Football” has consistently missed opportunities to inject more of the college experience into itself. And while the pageantry is all here - fight songs, mascots, male cheerleaders, canons, home-field advantage, it’s machismo is all pretty soulless once you realize it’s been the same for the past several years.

But first you should know that initial impressions are…frustrating. The main title screen is bright and vibrant, utilizing a ‘flat’ design with big block letters and solid colors. The problem is that you’ll be seeing a lot of it. Seemingly every sub-menu will automatically bounce you back to the main screen with a simple “B” button press, even if you’re two or three options into a given sub-menu. Between this and a general lack of intuitiveness within these menus, It took me a little under an hour to properly import my created team, adjust the gameplay options, and start a Dynasty.

NCAA Football 2014
NCAA Football 2014
Photo credit:EA Sports

A Dynasty mode that is sadly disappointing, too. The progression and recruiting systems - the main draw of this feature - are just so…bland. There’s no humanity here at all. In prior “NCAA Football” titles you’d be calling recruits, pitching them on various aspects of your program, scheduling them to visit during a game you think you could win, and so on. And when they finally committed to your school (after being promised the moon, stars, and sky), and you got to play as them on your team, it was satisfying as hell - and even better when you realized you could export them to “Madden” and draft them to your franchise team (which is a feature that returns to “NCAA 14” after being cut last year).

Now it’s just plugging a finite number of points into a given player and seeing what happens, which turns the experience into an Excel spreadsheet - a problem “Madden 2013” had last year as well. It’s too far removed from reality to be interesting. You can also level up your created Coach with XP earned from on the field accomplishments, cutting down on penalties and how rattled your QB is by another team’s home field advantage for example - which is neat, but it feels half cooked. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s a lot of nuance and depth to the system, and if you’re a finance major or something you’ll probably enjoy it greatly. But over several seasons I barely touched the recruiting and the progression systems, and had a great deal of success signing good players regardless. The game practically plays itself.

“Road to Glory” fares a little better in the personality department, allowing you to customize your position, school, skills, and so on, before throwing you into a high-school football game where you play in hopes of getting a scholarship to a good program. The early going in this mode is great and always has been. There are numerous great touches - for example when I selected my hometown as Taunton, Massachusetts, I was immediately paired against rival towns Norton, Plymouth, and Dighton. Similarly there are a bevy of high school fields to choose from, and I’m certain you’ll be able to find one that will at least partially remind you of your own. Taking the field as a QB, playing football for your future, in your old high school colors, is great. You connect with the game on a level beyond simply playing football. But once you get signed to a college program it’s a lot of repetitive actions like practice, studying, playing games, and so on - with very little of the humanity, and personality that made the early stages of the mode so easy to invest in.

NCAA Football 2014”’s career modes yearn for an “Oregon Trail” style approach to things, with random events happening to your players and teammates that coincide with tough choices which have direct results on the field. As a coach I want the chance to suspend a player who has been caught under-age drinking at the cost of his stats, but with a boost to his awareness and grades. I want to start a 4th-string D-lineman the other players on my team root for because he’s so damn dedicated (they should make a movie about that…). I want to the game to at least *attempt* to act like the players on the field aren’t a collection of 1s and 0s, but real people with hopes and dreams and goals. I want to connect to these players, and be sad to see them turn pro, or graduate, or fail out. Considering there are no *real* players in this game, and EA’s tenuous relationship with the NCAA ending, I fully expect these sorts of options in the future.

Beyond the two main career modes, “NCAA Football 2014” offers a couple of other features worth checking out. Teambuilder makes a return, allowing you to create and customize your own team. The mode remains a lot of fun until it comes time to actually import your team, upon which you’ll struggle with menus and dated code that makes the whole process a lot harder than it should be. Ultimate Team makes its “NCAA Football” debut, but it’s strange simply because I can’t envision there’s going to be a huge user base for the mode once “Madden 25” releases - so I’d probably save your Microsoft points, but it’s worth a gander if you’re into collectible card games as much as I am.

NCAA Football 2014
NCAA Football 2014
Photo credit: EA Sports

It probably sounds like I’m “down” on “NCAA Football 2014” but I’m really not. Once you’re into an actual game, things are solid. There are numerous tweaks and additions to the gameplay formula that I welcome wholeheartedly. The Infinity engine is here and glorious as ever. I like that I can pick my formation and play without having to go into a separate sub-menu. I like that I no longer have to hammer “X” after every play to get into the menu featuring formations. I like that it’s no longer super easy to accidently decline penalties while hammering the ‘open playbook’ button. I like that the introduction “broadcast” of a game explains what a team is most known for, gameplan wise. I like that the “Hollywood Chicago” logo I hastily cribbed from the main page of this humble publication gets a fancy little reflector decal on it when placed on the helmet of the team I created via Team Builder. Offensive and Defensive ‘keys’ make a return and I love them as I always have. There’s an awful lot to like about this game.

But its got no soul. EA is in the midsts of launching “FIFA”, “Madden”, and “NBA Live” games for the next console generation, and reorganizing their entire development team to utilize a single game engine for sports games. Of all the franchises to get pushed down proverbial the totem pole, “NCAA Football” was probably the most ripe candidate, and it shows. “NCAA Football 2014” is a well assembled game with very little in the way of a personality or creative spark - it just sort of goes through the motions because it doesn’t know what else to do - sort of like that heartbreaking dating sequence from “Burn After Reading”. If you’ve skipped the last say, 3 years of this title, and want to get your college football on, absolutely pick it up, it’s great. But if you’re like me, and have played these games and “Madden”, yearly without fail, you’ll want to put this game on double secret probation.

“Star Trek: The Game” was developed by Digital Extremes and released by Namco Bandai. The version reviewed was for the Xbox 360 but the game is also available for the PS3.

HollywoodChicago.com video game critic Paul Meekin

By PAUL MEEKIN
Video Game Critic
HollywoodChicago.com

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