Okay. Nobody else is going to say it, so I guess I will. What a mess. But hear me out bc this is constructive criticism. For starters, this game appears to have not been tested by anybody before its release. And I’m truly disappointed with that. Surely there are people at HG and COG who are responsible for beta-testing games before they are released for purchase. But this one somehow seems to have fallen through the cracks.
Let’s start with the positives. Honestly, I really enjoyed playing the football games. I found the game mechanics to be very exciting. However, there’s a lot going on here that really took away from the experience. The first is just that there appear to be a lot of coding errors happening throughout. For example, the opposing team would sometimes receive a penalty, and then my team would lose yardage. Also, the stats appear to have very little impact on what happens. It feels more like a roll of the dice. My biggest pet peeve would be when the running back would just go running off with the ball and lose yardage for our team when we are in the middle of a play. That’s just not even realistic. And this happens A LOT. Even in the championship game, both teams were tied. And I was like, “Okay. We are going into OT!” But we didn’t. There were just 2 more mins put on the clock, and my team got to keep playing the rest of the quarter, even tho we had just scored. It was very odd.
Now, for the negatives of this game. There is no story here. And that is extremely unfortunate because there could be. Instead, what you end up with is several mini-subplots that genuinely go nowhere. The biggest one is the MC’s drug addiction. At the start of the story, this is really built up. But there is no meter to measure “how addicted” you are becoming to the pills. My character’s story got pulled into a huge presser and accused of addiction, denied it, and got caught lying. But there wasn’t any significant negative consequence to this action. In fact, after that scene, the addiction is never mentioned again.
Then, there was this argument that you walk in on between your RO and your family. It seems to be pretty intense. But where did this argument come from? There was no tension over dinner in previous scenes. And then again, this story is dropped, and you never hear about this again. Additionally, there is very little to no interaction between the MC and the coach or your teammates. Even tho there are stat bars for these relationships.
And again, I’m going to call out coding errors here. Because when you go to half-time during games, there are cutaways locker room scenes. However, these appear to be just randomly generated text. Throughout my story, our coach had five heart attacks during half-time – all with the same dialogue. And then, after almost every football game, there is a random text box about a blog that pops up. This does appear in the story, but it appears before you know what it is talking about and multiple times after this event occurs.
Overall, this HG genuinely had a lot of potential. I wish that the creator had worked with an author to create a real story here. Because I can see that there are elements of one, but this is not it. Football is a game of soul and passion. There are diehard fans for almost every team that exists. Speaking of, don’t get me started on the team names in this game. Cats vs. Dogs?! Really?!
Anyhow, this game would be greatly improved just by correcting the coding errors in it. But I do wish that someone would work with this creator to create a real story here. Again, the ideas are there. I can see them. There’s a lot of true potential. But ultimately, this is just a dice-rolling game where you play football games attempting to win.
Are those good reactions or naw??
