Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'd been looking forward to NFL Head Coach since I first read about it several months ago. After maxing out my Madden skills, I found myself rushing through each season of my dynasty just to get to the draft and free agency. I loved seeing my team take shape year to year, patting myself on the back when my vision paid off and muttering when I had to discard my busts to the waiver wire. NFL Head Coach was going to be just what I needed to satisfy my inner obsessive football fan. Well, the game unfortunately suffers from a big case of the woulda-shoulda-coulda's. EA had a great idea and clearly worked very hard on it, but ended up with something that's not much more satisfying than the dynasty tasks in Madden and ultimately not very much fun to play. You start out your career by creating a coach. There are numerous ways to tweak your coach - probably too many. I don't much care how wide my coach's mouth is, what shape his eyebrows are, or how chubby his cheeks are. They probably should have just made more presets and let you pick one. You also must choose what outfits your coach will wear to the office. . . and to practice. . . and to the games in warm weather. . . and to the games in cold weather. Suddenly you're transported into NFL Dress-Up. Uh-oh. The next step is to interview for a head coach position. This will be your first introduction to the dialogue system which dominates most of the gameplay. In this case, the questions posed by the team's owner appear on the screen and then you pick a canned response. If he likes what you have to say, your coaching attributes will go up and you're more likely to get a job offer. This back and forth is a repeated theme throughout the game, whether you're dealing with a player's agent or one of your coordinators, it's always this cross between the Sims and a multiple-choice quiz. Actually, not even multiple-choice because many screens full of words end with you only have one choice like "OK" or "Let's go do this." So much of this game comes down to these scripted exchanges and it's the first of its many lost opportunities. There should be some animations or even video instead of two static figures sitting in chairs blocked out by a screen covered in words. It's a setup which does nothing to make you feel engaged in the game. Once you choose a team to command, you must build your staff. You hold a meeting with all of your coordinators and coaches where you introduce yourself to each individually and then either a) tell him his job is safe, or b) tell him that he's out of a job. The way that this is presented, you're firing people in front of the entire staff - how awkward! But dont' get too happy with the hatchet man routine because you've only got a few days to interview and hire candidates. So how do you know who's available for these jobs? Enter your Personnel Director, or as I've come to call him Mr. Obstacle or The Dumbest Guy in the World. He'll email you a list of potential candidates each morning, even after you've filled a specific position. He also highly recommends the guys that you just let go yesterday. But don't let his behavior get your blood pressure up yet - save that for the draft. Oh, and by the way, he's the only position that you can't fire. Interviewing coaches also highlights how subpar the interface and flow of the gameplay is. You're given a list of names as candidates with absolutely no additional knowledge about them other than what their strongest attribute is. What happens when you ask your potential defensive coordinator his 3-4/4-3 preference and he disagrees with you? Why did I bring you in at all? So you blindly guess who you want to interview and then proceed to march through some Q&A - Q&A that makes no sense, that is, because everyone gets the same interview no matter which position they're after. So you'll ask your linebackers coach about how he'd improve the kicking game and your quartebacks coach about whether he prefers zone or man-to-man coverage in the defensive backfield. This glaring inconsistency is the first of many that really cast the game's claims of being the ultimate football sim in a suspicious light. And when you're finished interviewing, he demands an answer right then and there. So it's either hire him on the spot or let him go never to be heard from again. This meant that I oftentimes ended up hiring whoever came in on Friday but wished that I'd hired the guy from Wednesday when I had my chance. Your days as coach are mapped out in excruciating detail on your calendar. You spend a lot of times in meetings or in what's called "office hours". Each of these activities is then broken down into a number of tasks depending on how much time was assigned. Once you use up your tasks, you're finished with that activity and you move on to the next. Unfortunately, the definition of "task" is ridiculously specific here. For instance, if you want to make some changes to your depth chart, each swap counts as its own task. You only get two tasks per office hour, so swapping out a deep positions such as your wideouts could literally take you several days. It's also frustrating that you can only perform the tasks associated with whatever activity you're in at that time. So you may get an email on Monday indicating that another team has made you a trade offer. But you can't actually respond and begin hammering out the deal until Thursday, which is when you have time assigned for the "trade" activity each week. The AI for the off-season work is ridiculous. Your personnel man will meet with you weekly and offer up a list of no-names in positions that anyone could see you don't even need. When you get to the draft, he sulks in his responses when you don't take his every recommendation, saying things like "I like Smith the RB, but I'm sure that you'll pick someone else because you know so much." At least every other team is apparently saddled with the same level of competency. The draft results are incredibly unrealistic: Reggie Bush typically sits around until the high teens while D'Brickashaw Ferguson is usually a late 1st/early 2nd rounder. More in-your-face evidence that isn't the perfect football sim that it claims to be. There should be an option to have the teams draft as they really did in the NFL this year barring any variations that you throw into the mix, but there isn't. Scouting players highlights yet another oddity about the game. First off, where's the combine? You prepare a list of players that you want to evaluate, but are then handed a message about how "only the Personnel Director goes to the combine". This was another great opportunity for cutscenes or even mini-games, but instead, it's just more reading reports over the same old screen of your coach sitting in his office. The real problem is that you don't get any actual combine numbers - just videogame rankings from 1-100. How disappointing that a self-proclaimed sim would actually provide you less real data than its Madden counterpart (where you can actually play the games, don't forget). The draft plays pretty well, although it is a lengthy prospect and you'll want to turn off the choppy Mel Kiper sound clips after about five picks ("that's a fine pick that . . . Cleveland. . . just got for themselves in the . . . third. . . round"). There is no option to speed through other teams' picks, so even at 40 seconds per pick, you'll be sitting there for 20 or so minutes between actually making a pick. You can attempt to trade with other teams during the draft, but you rarely can hammer out a deal in the short amount of time that other teams have. So forget about moving up to get a specific player. A better system would have been to give every team the 5 minutes per pick that you automatically have and then give you a 'skip' function if you don't want to deal with a particular team. Also, there is a completely different look to how player info is presented in this game - different, but much worse. Rather than a simple sortable list of player data like every other sports game has used for some time, NFL Head Coach uses a field of icons representing players. You move about the icons trying to search for specific information, which is never easy and forget about making side-by-side comparisons of players. The developers of this game worked very hard to make this something other than a Madden clone but what they came up with manages to be different but not better. The rest of the Summer is spent with drab camp and practice activities. Once the season starts, you gameplan during the week and then patrol the sidelines during the contests. Coaching during the games is far from perfect, but it's a welcome break from looking at your coach sit in the office for hours. Each game takes about 40 minutes. You can call plays, make substitutions, and give pep talks to players on the sidelines. Each talk will result in either a plus or minus appearing above the players' heads, another nod to the familiar Sims setup. However, with no feedback given on why a particular message worked or failed, and with very little consistency on how messages are received, this is not very useful. Your ultimate aim is to have your year-round success catapult you into the Coaching Hall of Fame. Actually advancing into the top ten would take multiple seasons, a feat I can't imagine many will actually have the time to do. CONCLUSION EA was clearly concerned that people would out this game as a simple adaptation of Madden with simmed games. So, they decided to make everything in the interface different. However, different doesn't equate with better in this case. Data is very awkward to sort, search and retrieve and too much of the game is spent reading conversations on-screen. The AI is also terrible, which deflates the game's value as a true NFL sim. I suppose that it is a sim in the sense that you're acting like you have a job and this game sure does feel like work. PROS * NFL Films score throughout gives a legitimate football feel to the game - thankfully, EA Trax were given a vacation for this title * The game is scripted to provide you with on-the-fly tutorials, minimizing the learning curve CONS * The game is simply boring, relying too much on text conversations on-screen as your virtual coach sits static in his office * Despite the emphasis on this being a football sim, it's more videogame-y than its counterpart Madden in many ways, e.g. the 1-100 ratings of attributes rather than authentic combine stat categories. * Load time are atrocious and numerous throughout gameplay * No combine-related activities makes the offseason seem incomplete * AI is terrible, making it difficult to guage what your opponents are likely to do both on the field and during the draft.