All-Pro Football 2K8

"I wanted to love this game......"

Introduction - As a HUGE fan of ESPN 2K5 on Playstation 2, I was extremely pleased to hear that 2K Sports had released a 2K football game for the Xbox 360, and was even elated when I heard such greats as Derrick Thomas and Barry Sanders would be playable characters.

I have never been a fan of the Madden franchise with it's unrealistic stiff-as-a-board-upright-running players, to the totally unbelievable 60 to 70 yard Hail Mary's that consistently score, to the non-existent AI defense. ESPN 2K5 changed all this, the players were fluid in their movements, you didn't need to be at a certain angle to tackle someone, and the defensive AI would pick you off if you consistently chucked it into coverage. In short, it was like playing real football. So my hopes were relatively high for this 2K Sports game even though they didn't have a NFL license and as such they have none of the real NFL teams in the game.

Start-Up - After you fire up All-Pro Football 2K8 you are immediately taken to the Create New Team screen without any choice in the matter, there is no main menu. I'm not really fond of being forced to construct a Team from scratch, which is a very time consuming process, before I can even play a single game. This should come later, after you've had a chance to feel the game out, trust me if you like this game you'll WANT to construct your own team, the game designers don't need to foist it on you. You'll also be forced into a game immediately after your team construction is completed. In short when you first start this game you have little to no control until you've completed what the game designers want you to. The game designers should trust us more than that, and return to a user-friendly menu based system.

Which brings me another observation, the menu system is very odd. There isn't a standard menu screen. On any given screen, whichever one you happen to currently be on, you have to press left or right on the RIGHT ANALOG stick which causes a menu to shoot in from the right side. You then make your selection by pressing the "A" button. The odd thing is that the "B" button, which usually takes you back a selection or causes the menu to drop off the screen does nothing here. In order to remove the menu you have to press left or right on the RIGHT ANALOG stick again and it disappears. It doesn't sound like much but it makes navigation a real pain and when it's combined with the forced agenda from the game designers you never really get a sense of control.

The next thing I noticed was that for a relatively complex football game, (every button does something different depending on whether you're on offense or defense and what type of player you're controlling), the manual has no easy reference graphics for it's controls. Although, funnily enough, it does have a picture of the Xbox controller that lists which buttons are A, B, X, Y and the like, you know, in case you've been playing your Xbox all this time without knowing where the RIGHT ANALOG stick was. Odd. Why not using that graphic to show the offensive and/or defensive controls? Instead ALL the controls are just long lists of text, and while I am literate, reading a bunch of text while trying to play the game just heightens the learning curve unnecessarily. The manual looks and feels rushed.

Gameplay - This is where the game falls flat and excels. For this game 2K Sports secured the rights to use the likenesses of former NFL stars as opposed to NFL teams to give the game a professional feel, and the system they've used to incorporate these stars is intelligent and also addresses the issue of not having any official NFL teams. From the start you construct a custom team around your selection of stars and then that custom team is inserted into a one season league where you play 16 regular season games.

All the NFL stars are given, ironically, a star rating of gold, silver, or bronze depending on how strong the player is, obviously better players have better ratings. You construct your team around two gold star players, three silver star players and six bronze star players. After you have selected your stars the rest of your roster is filled in with randomly generated players for the remaining spots, which keeps micro-management to a minimum but also creates some problems. For example, you have NO way of looking at any stats of any non-star player. Non-star players never have any abilities and you can't even see a visual representation of them, they are literally non-existent. The problem this creates is that you have no way to gauge how good or bad they are compared to the star players. Do the RG players have different stats, or do they all have the same stats? You'll never know, but oddly enough you can shuffle them around in your Depth Chart to your hearts content even though you have no information on them at all.

Also in the first game you play, you are given a terrible selection of standard plays. The majority of offensive plays are non-standard off balance formations and on the defensive side of the ball you don't even start with the 3-4 defense, a very basic highly-used NFL defense. You'll have to correct your Playbook after the first game. Honestly, my recommendation is to skip the first game altogether, it's pointless.

Another annoyance is that on defense you have 5 to 6 seconds to select a defensive play. That's it. For the first game you'll have to turn the clock off to have any hope of finding a decent play before one is forced on you. I'm still not sure why the designers didn't use the standard "you have 10 seconds to select a play after the offense calls a play, but the play clock stops while you chose" option. To consistently get in the right play after the offense chooses, you'll want to keep your defensive Playbook nice and tight.

Another bug I noticed was that anytime I punted, after the ball was snapped and in the punters hands, the camera angle snaps to the extreme left until the ball is kicked. At first I thought I was causing it, but after some experimentation, it happened every time regardless of what buttons or joysticks I was pushing. Pretty frustrating.

Which brings me to the kicking system. There isn't the standard kicking meter. While that doesn't bother me, the system they've used to replace it does. At kick off or during punts, you pull the RIGHT ANALOG stick back and then push it forward as the kicker is about to contact the ball. I assume this is to simulate you hitting the ball, but there is no graphic to tell you when exactly you should be pushing forward, you just find out after the fact from a small text balloon that you were either to early or to late. Again, just another thing the heightens the learning curve for no reason.

The graphics are also hit and miss. The stadiums look pretty good, but some of the player models are horrendous. Check out Leon Lett who has a very dark face but has the arms of Dan Marino. Very odd.

The music is average to good, depending on your tastes. They have a mix of classic rock and modern music, with the classics being remixed a bit to extend their length. You'll have to turn it down a little in the Options menu though because it is obnoxiously loud.

So what's the good news?

The gameplay is still light years ahead of Madden. It's natural and fluid. The tackles look and feel real. The defense plays defense, you don't have to manually control every player to have a chance to stopping a play. Everything that made you love ESPN 2K5 from a gameplay perspective is still here and that's good news, because it's a solid foundation for some great football action. It's nice to see that the gameplay has survived intact to the next generation consoles. Though I do have to agree with another reviewer who pointed out that the running backs break a completely unbelievable number of tackles and can perform the same spin and juke moves over and over to dodge almost every defender, it does take some skill, but it definitely needs to be nerfed to a limit of one or two different moves per run.

Replayability - Here's another area where the game falls short. Your play options are pretty limited. You can play Exhibition games, online games, or ONE season, that's it. Once you've beaten a season once and become champions there's no real reason to play again because nothing has changed. The only real replayability comes in the form of online play, which will vary depending on who is online and who your friends are. Pretty limited stuff.

Overall - After playing this the feeling I get is that this was the testbed for future 2K Sports football games, which is a great thing. The bad thing is that this product is unfinished and rushed, and has a lot of growing pains to overcome. Having said all that, I cannot recommend this game to anyone, BUT I will buy the next football installment that 2K Sports puts out, this game has given me that much hope, and if you enjoyed ESPN 2K5 should buy the next one that comes out too, because that game will most likely be much closer to it.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/26/08

Game Release: All-Pro Football 2K8 (US, 07/16/07)