izigame.me

Pretty good football game.

As someone who knows football pretty well, I feel like this games does a good job of not dumbing down the playbook for you. I play with "all plays" on. There are 51 offensive formations, from empty (only 1 empty set formation) to WING-T to pistol to shotgun formations to heavy sets (with 6 linemen). I feel like I still haven't figured out the passing yet (I turned down the difficulty from the normal setting, which punishes you really really hard for holding the button a bit too long). Running behind your blockers feels great in this game... but really only running to the outside. Running between the tackles is not really possible. The offensive line doesn't really get much push and the physics engine basically says "player in the way, you can't go forward" then a D linemen sheds a block and you lose 2 yards.

Defensive feels pretty good, and at the higher difficulties I feel like the cpu AI took advantage of me in ways that a smart coach would (throw past my blitzer, waits for longer play to develop). You HAVE TO PRESS a button to make a tackle, which honestly I don't really like. On the switch controller, it feels very unnatural but on an xbox controller it's probably fine (Switch you have to press the bottom then top button, and if you snag the left button you will jump up and are guarateed to miss the tackle).

Kicking is super difficult for the same reason throwing is: overpress by a couple milliseconds and you are guaranteed to miss. The power bar is also not linear so you really have to thread the needle: 50% power the ball goes 10 yards, 100% power the ball goes 50+ yards. I changed this setting to make it easier.

There are some cool things about the game. You can run triple option from flexbone/Wing T! I did return a punt for a touchdown once, which is an appropriate rarity given my 20ish hours of play. Penalties are not really a thing (I have gone offsides a couple times but there is no holding). There are sliders to fine adjust your and the CPU's abilities like shedding blocks and throwing. I haven't gotten into those yet.

There are a couple things I sorely miss from the old really great madden games. You can only motion on plays where motion is shown in the playcard. Your audibles are static per formation (4 options per formation) and I don't think you can change them. You also can't have different player packages for a given formation.

The dynasty mode is pretty cool, and I have actually started to like recruiting then simming my season to see how the boys do. One thing that is a HUGE problem in recruiting is that left trigger is "auto recruit" without any confirmation. So if you've got your whiteboard out and you're 40 minutes into recruiting the perfect class but then put your controller down on the cushing and it accidentally triggers the auto recruit... guess what, the AI just used all your scholarships on absolute cans so you have to restart. I think I'm literally going to unmap the left trigger on my Steamdeck when I recruit because it's happened twice to me, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it's happened twice.

I did have an issue with the tutorial: It would not let me throw a pass. I almost returned the game right then and there. I've gone back to the turorial and it allowed me to do everything, so I don't really know what went on there.

All in all, a fun college football game with more depth than the art style suggests. I think it's made by a single dev which is pretty impressive. I give it a 8/10.