Backbreaker for the PS3

This month I am reviewing the new American Football game out on the market.

Concept: 3/5

Unfortunately I can not rate the concept of this game particularly high. It was a simple concept. The people making the game wanted to make a football videogame. Unfortunately, the Madden Franchise owns exclusive rights to the NFL teams, logos, etc. So faced with the fact that they were going to have to come up with all new teams they decided to run with that aspect and make the game very customizable. They also built the engine from scratch, I believe, and wanted to show off that they have a better engine than Madden.

Graphics: 4/5

Other than two things about the visual asthetic of the game I love the visuals. One thing is the players. They all look the same. The linemen look like the guys in the backfield, the kickers look like linebackers, it's just effed up. Other than changing a guy's socks or his skin color they all look like cookie cutter copies of each other. Then there's also their pads. I understand the need to make them look different but they pads have plastic muscles chiseled into the "armor" that they wear making it feel like the whole field is filled with the left overs from an old batman movie.

Now that I've ranted a bit about the players it's time to complain about the other thing which is the stadiums. From the looks of it, unless there's hidden unlockables, there's only a handful of stadiums. Now don't think I'm complaining about the lack of diversity in stadiums. I'm fine with them all looking the same cause I don't look at the stands that much. I focus more on the field. BUT, I do have a problem with the idea of only having 6-10 stadiums when you blatently label some of them. At one point I was facing off against the Oklahoma Stampede in their hometown and the stadium clearly said "DALLAS" everywhere... If you're going to only be making a couple stadiums please don't brand them to specific locations. Unless I am mistaken and there's a Dallas, Oklahoma I didn't know about.

Sound: 1/5

The sound is probably the worst part of the game. EVERY time there's a kick off in a match, the game plays POD's "Here Comes the Boom," then every replay of the kickoff it starts with the same guitar riff and these are the only two songs you will seemingly hear until the game is over. Also since there's no famous announcer in real life associated with this made up league the developers seemed to just say "We don't need one" Which is wrong because not having an announcer, other than the one in the stadium that tells the crowd what just happened, is boring and lack luster. It makes the game devoid of character and personality. There's also a lack of booing or even silence from the crowd. I was destroying a team in THEIR stadium 45 to 10 and the crowd was still cheering as loudly as when I beat a team by a similar landslide in my stadium.

Playability: 3/5

There's a few golden nuggets in the playability of the game and then there's also a number of things that just make you do a double take. One of the nuggets is when you play the quarterback and you're looking for a receiver. The up close looking over his shoulder technique they did in Backbreaker makes me wish that they had done it this way in Madden rather than the pass cone. Then when you want to pass to a player you can either throw it like a bullet or lob it to them. I will not lie to you, even though I did the training and "succeeded" eventually at trying to lob it... I have no clue how to do it. Juking is delayed or something so that it feels like it waits for you to release the thumbstick after entering the command for it rather than doing it immediately which leads to a lot of failed jukes. I sort of figured out how to do a spin but like the lobbing don't ask me to explain how.

I did appreciate the fact that wind seemed to actually affect kicks and such where as in Madden I knew I could overcome it with a couple twitches in the aiming I really had to plan and adjust in Backbreaker which I appreciated. The passing game is also kind of rediculous. It is so easy for interceptions and fumbles, now that I think about it, in this game that it's off putting. If they didn't name the game for the tackling aspect of the new engine they could have just named it "Interception City" and told you what you were going to be getting into. Now don't think I was intercepted on a lot and am now bitter. While a good deal of my passes were intercepted my defense did it a lot too. When I was making my team, which you have to do for "Road to Backbreaker" mode, I decided to make my team Offense oriented. But for 2 or 3 games I spent the whole first half only scoring on Defense cause someone on my defense intercepted it.

In fact it became a joke between my friends and I that my Offense would collapse under the redzone pressure so much that my game strategy was to have my offense get the ball into the redzone lose it to the other team and then score via an interception on defense. Also the playbook is the same for every team and the game will only show you a couple at a time if you're playing in Arcade mode. So if you do get this game do yourself a favor and play in Pro mode. You won't miss anything and it'll be an experience you can control more.

Ending on a positive note. I did like the fact that in interceptions and such it wouldn't autoswitch me to the ball carrier. Strangely enough I liked the ability to be the guy next to the one with the ball and blocking for him so he made it to the endzone and scored. It was strangely gratifying.

Entertainment: 3/5

You can see in some of the team logos that some teams have been around forever, some are fresh new teams, and some have possibly been having bad press so they reinvented their logo and such. All good and cool but other than some hints from how the logos have been designed you get no real understanding of the backstory of the league. I know in sports games stories are usually frowned upon and I'm not saying to include one, all thought it would have been cool in "Road to Backbreaker" mode to have included one since you're forced to be a new team. I would have loved a story about your team being a young upstart team that rises up through the minor leagues to eventually take on the champions in the Backbreaker Bowl. They could have perhaps included some short little history quips about the league in loading screens or something. I get the sense that there was a story behind the league and it's not shared.

It is fun watching the tackles seeing as no two seem to be the same thanks to the game engine. But the Instant Replay of the game was kind of terrible since it only allows you to see what your camera was looking at while you were playing the game. Which is HORRIBLE considering the fun of HAVING an Instant Replay ability is to zoom in and out and rotate the camera to see all those really cool plays that make you want to use the Instant Replay in cool angles. This is especially bad when something happens off camera so you want to use the Instant Replay to see what happened and you can't!

Also even though you can customize your logo and jersey for your team to an exponential degree, I was unable to find a create a player feature, which was again like the lack of an announcer, it made the game feel characterless and without personality. In this case without my own personality and characters as opposed to the lack of an announcer being a lack of the game's own character and personality.

X-Factor: 0/5

Unfortunately there's no X-Factor to this game. After playing it enough for a review I returned the game to get my money back. I can tell that they started with a cool idea and a good engine but it's not polished and defined in the direction they want to go enough. It's like Saint's Row vs. Saint's Row 2. The first one was just a GTA clone that kinda flopped. It wasn't all that great commercially or necessarily even as its own game. However, when Saint's Row 2 came out the hype was extraordinarily great for a bleh original game. But the hype was worth it as the second game turned out to be an awesome game.

I can easily see this happening for Backbreaker. They have the ground work for the game. It's an all right football game right now. But if they make a sequel I can easily see them focusing their work on what people say is a problem with this game and making an amazing sequeal. I can see this so easily in fact that I actually hope they make a sequel so I can get that better version of the game.

Total: 14/30

Well there you have it folks. That's my review of Backbreaker. It's an ok game. If you absolutely adore all forms of football games you should enjoy this one. But for the average Football Video Gamer... You can pass on this one and just wait for the sequel which should be better. I got this one thinking the areas they focused on would make up for the areas they didn't as I cared more about the areas they did focus on. But the truth is it wasn't enough. They need to strengthen their lack luster sections to make the game worth playing. Let's hope Backbreaker 2 comes out and it's good.