Ever since the day the NFL Street series hit shelves we have been impressed by it’s originality and thinking outside the box. EA Big’s newest rendition of the Street games was recently released on both the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 under the disguise of NFL Tour. For months we have heard promises about the Tour project, claiming it was the next big thing in the Street franchise. Throw in the fact that this was going to be the first game of this type from EA to hit the next-gen consoles this was a big deal. Everyone needs to get ready for a massive letdown because anyone expecting anything positive to come out of the Tour project will be sorely disappointed. It’s not that every single thing in the game epically fails it’s just that too much of it does. Gone are a number of the features from the old NFL Street games that made those games fun. Interactive environments, game breakers, player customization, and scored tricks are just a few of the best that were cut from NFL Tour. This forces NFL Tour into a mid-genre area where no game should ever attempt to fit in, the realistic arcade-like sports title.
First off NFL Tour is hitting retailers at a low low price point of only $39.99, which definitely helps it out a little bit. Even so the gameplay features that it offers are pitiful at best. Instead of having the robust, detailed create-a-player feature from the Street games Tour gives gamers the option to create a player from some pre-fab options and then keeping that character the exact same throughout their entire season. Seasons in a normal football game are replaced with tours in this one, each city offering a number of different challenges for the gamer to attempt. These challenges range from winning a game after spotting your opponent points or winning a game using nothing more than running plays. There are a couple different mini-games as well that are a lot of fun but we were stressed to play either of them for more than 20 minutes. The fantastic multiplayer mode is the only thing that saves NFL Tour from being a complete and total disaster in the gameplay department. For reasons we will explain later on the single-player tour offers no real reward system and playing it through once will be painful enough.
Tour plays like an early preview build of the NFL Street game released some five years ago. There is just something about the controls that feels awkward, unfinished, and just plain bad. For reasons unknown to us the running game is just plain useless, unless of course you use your quarterback to run down the sideline. On the other hand the 7v7 allows for some good open-field opportunities and thanks to the braindead defensive AI the scores will be high during most ten-minute games. There are no pads either so sprinting down the field to a touchdown can be done with surprising ease. Unfortunately this defensive disaster does not move over to the offensive AI. Anyone with any gaming football skills should be able to score plenty of points on the computer. Most average sports gamers will find themselves replaying the same challenge multiple times thanks to the computer’s uncanny ability to perform amazing button combos as well as having perfect timing every time you lock up with them in contact. NFL Tour provides gamers with no genuine reason to beat the game either. This mixed with the crazy-hard offensive AI causes Tour to be one of those games that most owners will never complete; there is just no good reason anyone to do it. One of our favorite features from the old Street games were the interactive (and ever changing) environments that players got to duke it out on. There were always little advantages and disadvantages to each street field and this added some bit of strategy to the game, in Tour there is no strategy.
