I decided to do this since I'm at a breaking point. I'll admit that I am a consumer whore. Granted I hadn't bought a new NCAA (or Madden) in 2 years so I'm not as bad as some people. But this is it. No more EA football games for me. And you shouldn't pick this up either because it's just not worth the money.

Before I continue, let me say this is the PS3/360 version. Some of the issues below don't happen in the Wii/PS2 versions.

Let's start with the improvements this year.

+ Custom Music. That's right, you can now load up and use your own tracks in game. You're given a list of situations and you can assign music to that. For example, the Texas band plays a certain song at the beginning of the 4th quarter. You can do that. It's a nice feature.

+ EA Locker - If you ever played NCAA, you'll know that it does not have the real player names in it. Over the years, people have entered in every player name, some for profit, others just released the save file. They'd also fix jersey numbers and other attributes. New this year is the Locker, where you can put a roster up and have people download it online through the game. Which probably hurt the people who sold rosters. One person buys and shares. With the world :P

+ Animations - Graphically impress (as long as you're looking on the field) they worked to make animations flow to one another more smoothly. So you can see a running back juke and then stiff arm without it looking quite as robotic.

I'll spare you the details of the rest, just know that it's your standard EA football fare. Only this year, QA must've gotten drunk. The list of problems with this game is large, and I'll explain them to you.

- Roster bug - Right off the back, users found that they had teams disappearing, player ratings dropping to 0. While some solutions have been used (don't edit teams while online, don't edit the last 4 teams etc) this caused a lot of problems and heartaches for players who wanted them.

- FG yardage added to drive summary - So you go 30 yards then kick a 30 yard field goal. The drive summary will say you went 60 yards, which is incorrect. You only went 30 and stalled

- CPU Sliders are broken - For those who don't know, sliders allow you tweak the gameplay to make it flow better for you. For example, if you drop QB Accuracy down to 0, your QB won't throw more than 30 yards. Well if you set the CPU QB ACC to 0, he's still bombing 60-70 yard throws. So it's been confirmed that the Human sliders control both human and CPU. The CPU sliders are just there for grins I guess

- Defense AI is horrible - EA made a change this year to speed stats. Basically, if your running back has a 98 speed, if no one else has 98 speed or higher and he gets open, there's little to no chance he'll be caught. They wanted to make it more realistic. However in doing so, they showed that the AI is stupid. Defensive backs will not take the correct angle to cut off the ball carrier and so miss completely.

Due to this, games end up in the 30 pt ranges and you will not stop the computer QB no matter what. It's common for the CPU QB to have 60-80% completion ratings, even on teams that shouldn't be that good.

Here's a few examples of horrible defensive AI. Both were on Heisman level (the hardest difficulty). Look at example 1, you'll see the defender about the 40 yard line come into view. Now watch what he does for the rest of the video.



Literally he could've made the play starting from the 35 or at least pushed out of bounce. But he runs with him O_O

Here's a goal line stand. Watch as the AI plays the pass with no receivers in sight. In fact, look at the school of fish standing in the endzone.



This right here is just horrible to watch. The AI grouped together like scared children.

- Online dynasties are a disaster - A new feature touted this year was a dynasty or season play online with others. I won't list everything wrong but the highlights include the game supersimming a game that was just played which changes the outcome, people locked out of their dynasty, users who were not part of a dynasty being listed as one, the game making decisions for you even if you made them yourself

- SuperSim - SuperSim allows you to have the game sim a game or some plays during a game for you. For example let's say you're winning with 1 minute to go. All you need to do is QB Kneel right? Oh go turn on supersim. Hey wait, why does the other team have the ball with 50 seconds to go?

It's because supersim doesn't run off the play clock nor does the clock keep going. What you would see in the logs are

1:00 QB KNEEL
0:57 QB KNEEL
0:54 QB KNEEL
0:51 PUNT

Basically more plays are run than physically possible.

This game is horrible. EA has promised two patches. First one will fix the roster bug. The second is to fix gameplay. But looking at the list and the videos, I don't think they'll do it.

My suggestion to you is hope that Madden has no bugs and skip NCAA completely. EA should be ashamed. But we know they're not.

Overall score 5/10 - DO NOT BUY