NCAA Football 09 for Xbox 360 Reviews by Gamers

I'm a huge NCAA football fan, and while many opined the 07 and 08 releases on the next gen consoles, I genuinely enjoyed them. 07 had a lot of flaws, but I was willing to let that go as the first release, and overall I enjoyed the game. 08 was great. Again some people complained, but online play was very fun, very competitive and absolutely required skill.

09 fixed the one biggest complaint I had with 08, and when I first played the game I thought, yes, this is wonderful. I think that's what the people at Gamespot and IGN got with their first impressions when they wrote they're reviews too.

But start playing a little more, and you start to realize just how atrocious the defense play is. Where do I start?

-There is no line pressure without MAJOR tweaks to the sliders. Online (ranked match), you obviously can't edit the sliders, so you're doomed to have the QB sit back there for 10+ seconds until one of your DBs makes a stupid move.

-Zones are completely worthless as your players do not play them correctly. Not making any effort to actually play their area, they just stand there as players cross in and out and underneath their zones.

I could go on and on about little things, but I'd run out of room. Wrong pursuit angles, getting sucked in to blocks (still, after all these years since about 02 or 03).

But wait, there's a new feature! Online dynasty. I'm willing to give a little slack as again it's the first release of this feature, but there are a couple major glitches which include schedule corruption, and not being able to convince players to stay.

Overall it's just not fun to play, which isn't to say I don't win. We have sliders so incredibly tweaked to try to get good gameplay for our online dynasty (on our 3rd because of schedule corruption) and it actually makes the game playable. It is definitely way harder than your average Heisman settings. The core of any sports game has to be it's gameplay, and EA fails with it in NCAA 09.