NCAA Football 11 Review: Best College Football Video Game

The NCAA Football franchise has always seemed like the younger brother of the Madden franchise. The graphics always seem to be hand-me-downs from the previous year's Madden game, and all too often the NCAA Football franchise has suffered from slightly clunky gameplay and sub-par CPU intelligence. Fortunately, NCAA Football 11 changes the gameplan and finally proves that a college football game can be just as good as a professional football game.

Improvements over previous NCAA Football games

Since moving to the newest generation of video game consoles (the Xbox 360 and the PS3), NCAA Football has been at a major disadvantage. NCAA Football 08 was a barely upgraded port of the original PS2 version of the game. NCAA Football 09 had some general improvements, yet still felt incomplete, both in terms of graphics and gameplay. NCAA Football 10 showed some minimal improvements, yet still seemed to under-utilize the potentials of the 360 and PS3.

NCAA Football 11, however, finally provides a next generation experience. Graphically, the players finally look somewhat realistic, the stadiums and fans are more vibrant and lively and the game animations are much more fluid and believable. The locations all have their own individual touches so fans of a certain team can immediately recognize their home stadium.

The graphical improvements don't just make the game look better. They are also at the crux of why the game plays and feels better as well. In past NCAA Football games, clunky animations could lead to situations where the player was unsure what just happened. Tackles would miss inexplicably, passes would be thrown at impossible angles, players would be called in-bounds when they obviously were not, etc. Although there are still instances of the graphics in NCAA Football 11 not being entirely realistic or accurate, they are much more believable than previous incarnations, and finally are on par with the graphics found in the Madden series.

Another interesting improvement is the introduction of labeling teams' playbook styles. In NCAA Football 10, if you weren't familiar with a particular team, you would have no clue what kind of offense the team ran until you either played as them or played against them. In NCAA Football 11, however, playbooks are labeled, for example, as a "spread offense" playbook or a "pro style" playbook. For those unfamiliar with different football offense styles, the game and manual give brief overviews of each type of offense, although these descriptions are sometimes not quite as thorough as they could be.

Problems with NCAA Football 11

Although NCAA Football 11 is the strongest game since the series moved to the newest generation of consoles, it still isn't perfect. The college fight songs are nice touches, but get old fast. The online servers are erratic and often make playing online (or even connecting to online components for the "Season Showdown" challenge) a hassle. The saving of highlights at the end of a game, as well as the overall menu speed, is also a little slower than it probably should be.

Although the announcing crew is improved with the absence of Lee Corso, who provided some of the most annoying video game commentary in the history of sports video games, both Brad Nessler and Kirk Herbstreit are fairly boring as in-game announcers, and often their analysis doesn't completely mesh with the in-game situation.

Also, even though the game has seen drastic improvement over previous NCAA Football incarnations, it still only provides two game modes that have any real value: Play Now and Dynasty Mode. Road to Glory Mode, where you create a high-school prospect and follow him through college, is limited in scope and often embodies more of the frustrations with being a student-athlete than the fun of playing the game. If you like watching a team run a gameplan that doesn't fully mesh with your talents or choosing between hitting the gym and studying, then Road to Glory is the mode for you. For the rest of us, it's just a waste of disc space that could be used for something more interesting.

Trophies/Achievements

Not every gamer is obsessed with Trophies (for the PS3) or Achievements (for the Xbox 360), yet it seems remiss to completely ignore the subject. As this is a review of the PS3 version of the game, I will refer only to trophies, although the actual objectives are the same for both systems (kind of nice when different companies are able to streamline things like that, isn't it?).

The trophies for NCAA Football 11 are similar to those in NCAA Football 10. There are a few for completing specific tasks in dynasty mode (like going through a season undefeated or getting a 5-star recruit), a few for tasks in Road to Glory mode (ugh), and a large portion of trophies dedicated to doing certain tasks in a game, such as beating an opponent by over 35 points on Heisman difficulty (the highest difficulty setting).

The most notable difference between the trophy list for NCAA Football 11 and NCAA Football 10 is the inclusion of trophies for certain playbook styles and the removal of any trophies that require online play. Very few of the trophies are difficult to obtain, although they do require a wide-range of skill sets and may require multiple playthroughs on Dynasty mode.

Conclusion

NCAA Football 11 may still live in Madden's shadow, but it has made marked improvements in its presentation and appearance and can stand on its own for the first time in the series' history. It's the most fully realized college football game I have ever played, and is a worthy purchase for any college football fan, even those that own a previous installment of the NCAA Football series.

Overall rating: 86/100

Websites:

Official NCAA Football website

Trophy list for NCAA Football 11 on ps3trophies.org