NFL Street 2
Think of it as NFL Street 1.5… and a slow drive in the right direction.
Published: January 10, 2005
The first NFL Street proved that slapping "Street" onto a game’s title and tricking it out to be "xtreem" to fit into the EA BIG lineup doesn’t necessarily mean it has the golden touch that the NBA Street games have.
The sequel makes some impressive strides in rounding out the whole experience, but the core gameplay is almost nearly the same, fancy-pants wall-jumping movies notwithstanding. While the variety in new gameplay modes does a great job of distracting from the fact that the main matches are still a bit of a chore, there’s not quite enough variety or distraction to pull you away from trudging through the same unbalanced matches the first game suffered from.
To get the basic gist of things, check out our original NFL Street review. The additions are plentiful, but again, the game is more or less unchanged from a fundamental level, and once you know what to expect from the first game (if you don’t already), that should set you up nicely for the extras you’ll get with the sequel.
"Sequel" is perhaps too strong a word. Sure, there’s more added here, but in many ways it feels more like the game the first NFL Street should have been. I’m not taking anything away from the first game, but with the same basic feel, plays and moves, the addition of a bit more girth to the different play modes makes it feel like a more complete way to experience the reality-flexing aspects of the series’ gameplay, not so much that it’s a full-on improvement to the formula.
Luckily, the additions to what you can do make for a wonderfully varied number of challenges… while they last. EA has apparently embraced the concept of giving you a near-endless amount of gameplay for your 50 bucks. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Burnout 3 quite literally offer enough racing to keep you entertained for weeks on end, and NFL Street 2 follows suit, packing hundreds of hours of stuff to play and unlock into the whole experience.
The bulk of your single-player experience will most likely come from two main modes. Own the City, where you play a series of pick-up games and mini-game-style challenges (more on those in second), pulling players from teams you defeat to build an uberteam to take on Xzibit (yes, that Xzibit) in a street ball game to end them all. NFL Challenge lets you take on NFL teams in a slightly more traditional milieu, but a variety of point- or performance-specific challenges net you additional development points with which you can bulk up your team for 150 days before you enter a final tournament.
All of the mini-games, be they a variant on Smear the Queer called Crush the Carrier, where everyone tries to dogpile on the ball carrier until the ball pops out, making whoever picks it up "it" or a take on Flyer’s Up where you catch randomly thrown passes while competing against a couple AI players (among others) help break up the endless grind of pick-up games and 7-on-7 matches, but they’re more of a distraction than an integral part of the experience. At the core, this is still the same endless series of slightly modified arcade football matches that you played in the first game. There’s no sense that the balance has changed all that much, and the running game still seems to rule here.
There’s been an attempt to boost the passing game a bit with the addition of wall moves, which allow you to juke and hurdle over players by vaulting off the wall, and let you get a little extra air before passing. Along most walls there are also "hotspots" -- images that can be tricked off of or slammed into to gain extra points. Jukes, hurdles, broken tackles and passes all give you points on offense, and tackles that slam opponents into the hotspots will net you a few extra points, but the same applies to your opponents. The settings for these hotspots, 12 new visually interesting arenas certainly look more urban than the first game’s locales, but the actual dimensions and basic setup are the same, leading to a feeling of skins laid across the same field.
The style points work to the same end as the first game; they build your GameBreaker meter just as in NBA Street games, but like the second NBA Street, the meter has been overhauled to allow for two levels. Building things up twice allows you to trigger a nigh-unstoppable event that either strips the ball from opponents, or gives you a serious running or passing advantage. It’s not quite the canned sure-thing event that NBA Street 2 offered, but unless you completely botch things, it’s an almost guaranteed way to get a touchdown.
But if the gameplay was slightly altered from the first game, the visuals in the second are more or less a carbon copy. Sure the environments are more detailed and there appears to be a slight change in lighting with the passage of time (that could certainly just be me), but the engine, animations, moves and models haven’t improved a lick. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course; NFL Street is still one of the better looking football games on any system, but it would have been nice to see a bit more in the way of effects or new moves -- or at least a better example.
There's also the matter of the character models and overall graphic design. The characters sport an odd sort of super-deformed look (especially with your randomly generated Own The City teammates and opponents) that doesn't really fit the overall feel of the game. Of course, the overall feel is a subjective thing, since the game certainly doesn't try that hard to deliver any sort of cohesive feel. All the gear and jewelry you can buy for your players don't really add to the underground feel of the game, it just makes it look like a bunch of cartoon characters with over-wide jaws what to be rap stars. The menus are painfully bland, almost amateurish in look. I honestly thought most of it was placeholder art -- especially the GameBreaker transitions -- it's really that blah.
The audio, like the visuals, is more or less the same as the first game. The effects are solid, the trash talking annoying and repetitive and the ambient effects (like wrenches dropping in a construction yard) are welcome, but you won't really get a good idea of things unless you turn off the music, which, fortunately is such a bad mix of sound-alike hip-hop and power pop tunes that it's doubtful that you'll keep it on for all that long. Once you turn off the trash talking and music, it's actually a rather pleasant and still impressively visceral game, which says something about what the audio team pulled off before it was all slathered in wanna-be street vibe.
NFL Street 2 is a solid game, and one that I wish had been released first. It's a great stepping stone to what EA Tiburon can do with the sequel should they decide to break out of the Madden practice of small progressive tweaks and go for a full-on overhaul of the system. For now, though, this is in my mind, NFL Street 1.5, and the game the first one should have been. If you dig the basic gameplay, you're going to get literally weeks of stuff to pour over, but you'd better make damn sure you're the time that enjoys marathon sessions of the same basic match. Then again, if you're into sports games, there's probably a good chance that you can stomach that kind of monotony. For the mainstream audience, however, this may be too much of a decent thing.
The sequel makes some impressive strides in rounding out the whole experience, but the core gameplay is almost nearly the same, fancy-pants wall-jumping movies notwithstanding. While the variety in new gameplay modes does a great job of distracting from the fact that the main matches are still a bit of a chore, there’s not quite enough variety or distraction to pull you away from trudging through the same unbalanced matches the first game suffered from.
To get the basic gist of things, check out our original NFL Street review. The additions are plentiful, but again, the game is more or less unchanged from a fundamental level, and once you know what to expect from the first game (if you don’t already), that should set you up nicely for the extras you’ll get with the sequel.
"Sequel" is perhaps too strong a word. Sure, there’s more added here, but in many ways it feels more like the game the first NFL Street should have been. I’m not taking anything away from the first game, but with the same basic feel, plays and moves, the addition of a bit more girth to the different play modes makes it feel like a more complete way to experience the reality-flexing aspects of the series’ gameplay, not so much that it’s a full-on improvement to the formula.
Luckily, the additions to what you can do make for a wonderfully varied number of challenges… while they last. EA has apparently embraced the concept of giving you a near-endless amount of gameplay for your 50 bucks. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Burnout 3 quite literally offer enough racing to keep you entertained for weeks on end, and NFL Street 2 follows suit, packing hundreds of hours of stuff to play and unlock into the whole experience.
The bulk of your single-player experience will most likely come from two main modes. Own the City, where you play a series of pick-up games and mini-game-style challenges (more on those in second), pulling players from teams you defeat to build an uberteam to take on Xzibit (yes, that Xzibit) in a street ball game to end them all. NFL Challenge lets you take on NFL teams in a slightly more traditional milieu, but a variety of point- or performance-specific challenges net you additional development points with which you can bulk up your team for 150 days before you enter a final tournament.
All of the mini-games, be they a variant on Smear the Queer called Crush the Carrier, where everyone tries to dogpile on the ball carrier until the ball pops out, making whoever picks it up "it" or a take on Flyer’s Up where you catch randomly thrown passes while competing against a couple AI players (among others) help break up the endless grind of pick-up games and 7-on-7 matches, but they’re more of a distraction than an integral part of the experience. At the core, this is still the same endless series of slightly modified arcade football matches that you played in the first game. There’s no sense that the balance has changed all that much, and the running game still seems to rule here.
There’s been an attempt to boost the passing game a bit with the addition of wall moves, which allow you to juke and hurdle over players by vaulting off the wall, and let you get a little extra air before passing. Along most walls there are also "hotspots" -- images that can be tricked off of or slammed into to gain extra points. Jukes, hurdles, broken tackles and passes all give you points on offense, and tackles that slam opponents into the hotspots will net you a few extra points, but the same applies to your opponents. The settings for these hotspots, 12 new visually interesting arenas certainly look more urban than the first game’s locales, but the actual dimensions and basic setup are the same, leading to a feeling of skins laid across the same field.
The style points work to the same end as the first game; they build your GameBreaker meter just as in NBA Street games, but like the second NBA Street, the meter has been overhauled to allow for two levels. Building things up twice allows you to trigger a nigh-unstoppable event that either strips the ball from opponents, or gives you a serious running or passing advantage. It’s not quite the canned sure-thing event that NBA Street 2 offered, but unless you completely botch things, it’s an almost guaranteed way to get a touchdown.
But if the gameplay was slightly altered from the first game, the visuals in the second are more or less a carbon copy. Sure the environments are more detailed and there appears to be a slight change in lighting with the passage of time (that could certainly just be me), but the engine, animations, moves and models haven’t improved a lick. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course; NFL Street is still one of the better looking football games on any system, but it would have been nice to see a bit more in the way of effects or new moves -- or at least a better example.
There's also the matter of the character models and overall graphic design. The characters sport an odd sort of super-deformed look (especially with your randomly generated Own The City teammates and opponents) that doesn't really fit the overall feel of the game. Of course, the overall feel is a subjective thing, since the game certainly doesn't try that hard to deliver any sort of cohesive feel. All the gear and jewelry you can buy for your players don't really add to the underground feel of the game, it just makes it look like a bunch of cartoon characters with over-wide jaws what to be rap stars. The menus are painfully bland, almost amateurish in look. I honestly thought most of it was placeholder art -- especially the GameBreaker transitions -- it's really that blah.
The audio, like the visuals, is more or less the same as the first game. The effects are solid, the trash talking annoying and repetitive and the ambient effects (like wrenches dropping in a construction yard) are welcome, but you won't really get a good idea of things unless you turn off the music, which, fortunately is such a bad mix of sound-alike hip-hop and power pop tunes that it's doubtful that you'll keep it on for all that long. Once you turn off the trash talking and music, it's actually a rather pleasant and still impressively visceral game, which says something about what the audio team pulled off before it was all slathered in wanna-be street vibe.
NFL Street 2 is a solid game, and one that I wish had been released first. It's a great stepping stone to what EA Tiburon can do with the sequel should they decide to break out of the Madden practice of small progressive tweaks and go for a full-on overhaul of the system. For now, though, this is in my mind, NFL Street 1.5, and the game the first one should have been. If you dig the basic gameplay, you're going to get literally weeks of stuff to pour over, but you'd better make damn sure you're the time that enjoys marathon sessions of the same basic match. Then again, if you're into sports games, there's probably a good chance that you can stomach that kind of monotony. For the mainstream audience, however, this may be too much of a decent thing.