All-Pro Football 2K8

July 23,2007 - It’s been nearly three years since the last 2K football game was released and it’s nice to see the old friend return. With the NFL license unavailable to the developers, they went their own route to sign over 200 legends from the NFL to star in All-Pro Football 2K8. Instead of having pre-set teams, you now get the chance to pick and choose from these legends to form your own team to play both online and off. Did the break do good for 2K8 or is it a little rusty?

The workaround for All-Pro Football 2K8 to not having the NFL license is to sign over 200 NFL legends from John Elway and Jerry Rice to Chris Spielman and Leon Lett and create a sort of fantasy football aspect to drafting them to make teams. All of the legends are divided into gold, silver, and bronze tiers and you get two gold players, three silver players, and six bronze players. It’s enough to allow you try to figure out if you should go for a strong offense, defense, or spread the love across both sides. After picking your 11 legends, you get to choose the type of scrubs that’ll fill out the rest of the team. While they may not be real, they can get the job done just fine. You then pick out the team you want and alter their name, city, and even the jerseys themselves. It’s quite an impressive amount of customization that you can do here. The ability to create several teams seems to be like making a deck of cards for one of those collectible card games, as you can have several different types of teams to bring out and see if your friend has the better deck, or team. It’s unfortunate that some legends like Jim Brown, Bo Jackson, and many others aren’t here, but that can be hopefully rectified in 2K9.

It seems clear that the developers spent a lot of their time on getting the legends signed for All-Pro Football 2K8 and getting the game ready for its next-gen debut that they couldn’t get a deeper single-player mode into the game than season mode into the game. It’s been around 10 years since the franchise mode’s been introduced and it’s a shame that the game doesn’t have one, especially for the next-gen pricing. With just a paltry season mode, it’s clear that the developers wanted everyone to head online, which has a little more meat to it. The season mode’s okay, but with no real feeling of progression, it’s hard to really care about having a winning season and going to the playoffs because that’ll be all you can really accomplish. Despite that, it’s really easy to just get a game going, as the team select screen for the quick game mode always appears when you first boot up the game, after you’ve created at least one team. Where the action really happens is online, where the standard 2K options like leagues and tournaments are the highlights of the offering here.

The big thing every 2K football fan likes to emphasize first is the gameplay. All-Pro Football 2K8 is sure to please most fans of NFL 2K5 because it’s still largely unchanged here, which means that the flaws you could tolerate for $20 are a little bit annoying at $60. Despite the glaring flaws, All-Pro Football plays a very good game of football. Depending on how you build your team, you can get vastly different results. Offense-heavy teams can blow apart defenses a little too easily while defense-heavy teams can dominate the offense and try to squeak by offensively. Passing feels great, running can be a lot of fun, and defense works well. Kicking has gotten a makeover, though the stupid with a new analog mechanic that requires you to time your analog stick movements with the on-screen movements of the kicker. The problem is that it’s hard to get in a rhythm when each kicking situation is different in the required rhythm. Kickoffs have you waiting around five second from when you pull the stick down until the kicker actually kicks the ball. It’s just a frustrating system that isn’t going to be easy for you to master within a few games. All-Pro Football’s still fun to play after the long hiatus, but it’s unfortunate that the gameplay has barely been touched in the past three years.

All-Pro Football 2K8’s now in HD, but how does it look? Well, it looks a lot like NFL 2K5 in HD, it’s not much of a mind-blowing improvement. The legends look pretty close to their real-life counterparts, but the whole reason of having these guys should be in replicating them perfectly. A whole lot of the players’ looks are just off from what you’ve seen of them in real-life and it’s kind of disappointing. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that John Elway and Troy Aikman were related. Throw in off-character stuff like Barry Sanders actually celebrating when he scores and you can’t but help wondering why these kinds of details aren’t in the game. Besides the nitpicking, the animations are where the game shines. There are tons of animations and it keeps the game fresh when you see how nicely quarterbacks drop back for the pass or see the number of tackles the game has to surprise you. The load times in All-Pro Football have to be some of the best in the genre, as soon as you’re done with the game, you can be into a new one within seconds and keep the enjoyment going. The main difference between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions is that the Xbox 360 runs at 60 frames per second while the PS3 version is stuck at 30 frames per second. While the Xbox 360 may have the quicker game, both versions are locked in at their respective frame rates and run smooth as a whistle.

The presentation’s nicely done in All-Pro Football 2K8, as the new Field Pass feature allows you to hear what’s going on in the huddle as the plays are being called. However, the player’s lips aren’t always synced properly or you see that the player has crossed-eyes, which kind of ruins the coolness factor as it happens again and again. The announcers from NFL 2K5, Dan Stevens and Peter O’Keefe, return to fill you in on the action and bring some new stuff to talk about, along with a lot of old stuff you’ve already heard before. While they do a good job of entertaining, they start sounding robotic once numbers are brought up, which kind of hampers the good announcing. The soundtrack’s quite atrocious, with maybe a remix of Rush’s Tom Sawyer being the “best song” available, so feel free to turn it off as soon as possible and play your own music.

While there are a lot of gripes with All-Pro Football 2K8 with the $60 price tag, it’s still a lot of fun. It’s just that there’s not much here to keep the fun going unless you head online for the leagues or tournaments. While for the latest installments in an established series, it’s a bit of a disappointment. For the first installment of a promising, new series, it’s a pretty good start. If 2K9 can provide a deeper single-player experience and many more legends added to the roster, All-Pro Football 2K9 is certainly a game that could really show up Madden with more than just good gameplay to offer.

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