Many things that made the Street games so fun return during the multiplayer portions of NFL Tour so we found ourselves spending 90% of our time with this game online or playing a buddy sitting next to us on the couch. The number one reason behind this is the horrid AI that poisoned Tour. Not only is the defense some of the worst we have ever seen the offense is the exact opposite, some of the best. When playing NFL Tour online or offline the main thing to perfect if you want to win is the timing of your button presses during contact. As soon as contact is made (on offense or defense) the option to hit a specific button sequence is made available. If that sequence is pressed at the correct time the gamer’s player will perform a special move, either juking a tackle, stripping the ball, or some other sort of acrobatic trick. While it is nice to see EA try something a tad different it just doesn’t work in NFL Tour. The older Street games had these gameplay mechanics down much better and they didn’t have to involve any “revolutionary” timing systems.
Graphically this game is easily one of our biggest disappointments on the Xbox 360 thus far. Everything looks bland and probably could have been developed on the Playstation 2 or even PSP. For some reason the developers decided that graphics were not an important feature and gave up on them completely. Some of the player models in NFL Tour do look something like their real-life counterparts most of them have generic faces and no distinguishing features to set them apart from other player models. Everything in the game does run at a smooth framerate with all the animations looking very fluid. As we said earlier all of the stadiums/fields are the same, with their astroturf grass and bleacher seating. Nothing unique is done to tell one stadium from another except a couple signs/banners with the hometown’s name on it. There are a few cool fireworks that go off after touchdowns and wins but even the actual graphical parts of the fireworks are sub-par. Everything that was artistic and cool from the NFL Street games is gone and what is left is just a shell of a game, nothing more. Multiple times during our review session we noticed where corners were cut. For a game like Tour to stand out from other football games it really needs to have more originality in it’s graphics department. Just a little more effort in a couple areas and NFL Tour could have been a really good looking game able to compete with anything out there on the 360.
Following a continuing trend with NFL Tour the audio portion can make your ears bleed, literally. A man by the name of Trey Wingo does the announcing and after the amount of time we had to spend with Tour for this review we really do believe that he is the spawn of Satan. With a voice that could be described as the child of Michael Jackson and Rosanne Barr and a script stolen straight from Paulie Shore’s football comedy sketch there are times when our surround sound was completely muted, for an entire game. We know it looks as if this entire game was horrible, and while that is partly true there is still a little bit of fun that can be had with NFL Tour; and that should not be overlooked. Some slack is also given because this is EA Big’s first shot at the series on the next-gen platform. There were multiple times while reviwing the game that we found ourselves having a good time, most of those were spent playing another human being. This can be achieved offline or over Xbox Live. If only NFL Tour rewarded gamers more for making big plays or winning tournaments we could recommend the game on it’s single player merits alone. Considering the features that made the Street games great have all been stripped from Tour it’s hard to pay even forty dollars for it. The gameplay mechanics, features, and graphics are all less than have come to expect in this gaming generation. Luckily there are a few things that keep NFL Tour from totally bombing and if you are a huge fan of these type of sports game don’t hesitate to check it out. At the end of the day the game has been stripped of it’s former glory and is now just a below-average sports game in an already over-crowded genre.
