All-Pro Football 2K8 Review (Xbox 360)

Rarely do I fit into any product's target demographic as well as I do into that of All-Pro Football 2K8, the new historical-superstar-based football game from 2K Sports. First, the game appeals to football lovers with a passion for the game's history. Count me in. (I've always added great players from years past, like John Elway and Walter Payton, to modern NFL games.) Second, it appeals to anyone who wants an alternative to games juggernaut Electronic Arts' Madden NFL series, or is annoyed with the NFL. (Also me.) Finally, the game's aimed squarely at fans of the old NFL 2K series or its pinnacle, ESPN NFL 2K5, which I consider the best football game ever created.

So when I say that I like this game, but I don't love it, that could be all you need to know.

The history
From 1999 to 2004, NFL 2K was a football series with cool innovations like online play and TV-like presentation. In 2003, the game's name became ESPN NFL Football. That game, as in years before, received great reviews. But Madden NFL 2004 sold much better and was given a display in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The next year came ESPN NFL 2K5. Desperately seeking market share, and having already invested in most of the game's technology in years past, 2K Sports cut the price of the game to $20.

It didn't topple the market leader, but it helped. Madden 2005 outsold ESPN NFL 2K5 on the PlayStation 2 by a big margin: 4.46 million copies to 2.04 million. On the Xbox, though, it was very close: Madden sold 1.45 million copies to ESPN's 1.41 million. (These numbers are taken from vgchartz.com.)

ESPN NFL 2K5 was only made for the PS2 and Xbox. But EA also published Madden 2005 on five other platforms. So Madden's final margin of victory over NFL 2K5 was well into the millions of sales.

Yet EA still felt threatened enough to procure an exclusive license from the NFL and NFL Players' Association for several years. (Both licenses matter: Tecmo Bowl, the only football game that actually belongs in the Hall of Fame, had just an NFLPA license.) Just to ensure its spot in hell, the company also secured exclusive rights to NCAA football and the Arena League.

2K didn't sit on its thumbs, though, seeking out the only recognizable faces left: old-school superstars. Three made the cover: Jerry Rice, Barry Sanders, and John Elway, but several more of that caliber are in the game (Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas, Dick Butkus, and Walter Payton, to name a few). The result is All-Pro Football 2K8.

The gameplay
All-Pro Football 2K8 will feel immediately familiar to fans of ESPN NFL 2K5. Like Madden or NFL 2K, it’s a sim game, meaning it seeks to approximate real-life football.

The biggest difference in All-Pro 2K8 from other games is the pace. Plays in 2K8 unfold a bit more slowly than they do in Madden, and probably more slowly than they did in 2K5. It's likely done in the name of realism. As in real football, large chunks of time run off the clock between plays. However, Madden moves briskly between plays not to be unrealistic, but for the sake of fun. At times, I found myself annoyed with 2K8's presentational touches, though you can always just hit "A" a lot to skip them.

Another difference is the addition of legends to the game. In most sports games, despite arcane and specific numerical rankings, it can be hard to tell the rookies from the stars on the field. But the Hall of Famers in this game―especially the gold-level players―really do play like Hall of Famers. With the right pass rusher, for instance, you can put some real heat on the quarterback. (That matters a lot in 2K8, as quarterbacks become wildly inaccurate when they aren't set.) Not only that, some players have specific animations, like Walter Payton's scissors kick in the open field. Good times.

There are some differences from NFL rules, such as the ability to send multiple offensive players in motion, that are small enough to make you wonder why they bothered.

Another difference is All-Pro's disaster of a new kicking system. It uses an analog stick, similar to swinging a club in a Tiger Woods game, except Tiger doesn't make want you want to run a cheese grater along a programmer's eye socket. I don't know what's worse: not knowing when to swing, or having your only feedback being a quick pop-up that says something like "Late" but disappears before you read it the first few times. It's garbage. As a result, I had a lot of short kickoffs and didn't even try a field goal. That's a problem, though I guess I might figure it out eventually.

The presentation
All-Pro Football 2K8, like the Xbox version of its predecessor, has full-video highlights at halftime and the end of games. Unlike ESPN 2K5, there is no really-short studio show or post-game interviews. If you care, you're a dork.

The game also features a real-time news ticker at the bottom of the screen when you're connected to Xbox Live, an idea "borrowed" from Madden. I found it distracting and immediately turned it off. The score is always on the screen during gameplay in the form of a bright red bar. This was also annoying, but I couldn't find a way to turn it off. (It doesn't get in the way of the play ever, but it takes up a lot of space.)

The programmers made some very bizarre interface choices. Expect to get lost in the menus a few times. I lost changes to my created team about three times when I couldn't figure out how to exit the menu system. (Two problems: the button I used to bring up the menu couldn't make it go away, and making a different menu selection brought up not a, "Do you want to save?" box, but an "Are you sure you want to lose your changes?" box. Yes = lose your changes, no = you're still stuck in the menus.)

One major controversy that has emerged with the game's presentation. That is the inclusion of both a) O.J. Simpson and b) a team called the Assassins, whose logo is a large knife. Even worse, the game's fictional stadiums sometimes incorporate celebratory animations. Anyway, there's video on the Internet of someone scoring a touchdown with O.J. Simpson while a member of the Assassins (since you can put any player on any team), followed by a gigantic Assassins mascot behind the end zone making an overhead stabbing motion. I kid you not. 2K is saying they didn't mean for that to happen, obviously. The first thing I thought of when I saw there was an Assassins team was that O.J. was in the game, though, so I don't know how they missed that possibility.

The graphics
All-Pro Football 2K8 has been criticized for its graphics, but I have absolutely no idea why. Well, I sort of do―the game lacks the over-the-top lighting effects common to the current era, Wii nothwithstanding. But it has fine graphics.

The game looks very nice in high-definition, and the animations, while imperfect, are smooth and look pretty realistic. The graphical detail on the players is astounding. Try zooming all the way in on a player's face some time in a replay. I could make out crow's feet on Floyd Little's face. Also, player's helmets and uniforms will get scuffed up over the course of a game, and no, it's not always in the same place. Even crazier, I zoomed in on Little on a play in which he merely stayed back to block. While blocking, his eyes swiveled to follow the play, and he even blinked a few times. Awesome! The one problem is that some legends look more like themselves than others.

If you watch the game in slow-motion replays, you'll also see the ball act in physically improbable ways before a catch, for example, just like in every other football game, but I never noticed it at full-speed.

The sound
Dan Stevens and Peter O'Keefe, two fictional characters who announced previous NFL 2K games, return for All-Pro Football 2K8. Unfortunately, as in Madden, many of the lines are repeated from years prior, though it sounded like they've been re-recorded. The announcers don't announce legends any differently than they do generic players: Deacon Jones gets the same canned comments as everybody else.

The music in this game sounded all right the first time, but quickly grew annoying. The game's sound effects, though, are fantastic.

One nice touch is frequent cutaways to players talking to each other, on the sideline or in the huddle. I enjoyed one memorable exchange between teammates Rice and Bart Starr:

Rice: I'm gonna be hot today. I can feel it!

Starr: You already hot!

The end
ESPN NFL 2K5 raised the bar higher than any game that had come before it. All-Pro Football 2K8 doesn't improve on that game so much as it revisits it on the new generation of systems. Unfortunately, that brings with it next-gen downsides, such as price-gouging. (The game is $60, and a menu choice for a highlights editor is actually a commercial for a highlights editor you can buy over Xbox Live.)

Personally, I'm a big NFL fan, and the loss of the license was a bigger drawback than I'd thought it would be. If you want to use a specific player, you have to make room for him on your team, and if you want to face a specific player, there's not really a fast way to find which team he's on. I did get to spend one game beating down Archie Manning, though, which is almost as satisfying as cheap-shotting one of his sons in Madden. (One plus, as Patrick Hruby of ESPN noted, is that appearing in this game has helped some old-time players financially, something the actual NFL and NFLPA are loathe to do.)

At first I thought this game would have real staying power, but the lack of any consistent identity on the teams hurts it in the end. It's fun, but I can't recommend it unless you're a 2K loyalist or desperate for a current-gen football fix.