NCAA Football 07

July 27,2006 - EA Sports has always been the leader when it comes to College Football games; in fact, it’s hard to even remember when a competitor has even come up with valid competition. Year after year, the improvements made to the game are top-notch, leaving almost none of their fans in disappointment. Now with NCAA Football 07 on store shelves, EA Sports has continued the tradition.

This year, the name of the game is momentum. Momentum is an unseen factor in about every sport, when you speak of collegiate football. Look at the Rose Bowl game between the USC Trojans and the Texas Longhorns. Both teams, undefeated, were considered to be the very best the nation had to offer. But nobody gave Texas a chance. All they had was a junior quarterback by the name of Vincent Young. But you look at USC, and they have all sorts of monsters on offense including Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush—who just so happens to be featured on the cover of this game, and former Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart. Each one of these three mentioned playmakers definitely made plays, but none ate up momentum so much as Young did. He dominated on each and every play the ball was in his hands. He was smart with the ball and got rid of it every time he had to. When he was in trouble, he ran with blazing speed (even though it looked like he was literally jogging away from defenders) and nobody was able to take him down. He made the defense tired and he made all of his teammates feel fresh. With that, they won the game on what pretty much was the last play of the game.

There’s a little meter you’ll see on the bottom of the screen that gauges your momentum. This gauge will continue to increase whenever you make some plays—like bursting across the line for a 30-yard gain or forcing a fumble on the goal line. When the gauge reaches its peak, your players become slightly bolstered up, causing you to be a just a little more careless with the football if you want. With momentum on your side, your players will move faster and play better; receivers will make one-handed grabs, running backs will break more tackles, quarterbacks will have a quicker release; pretty much every meaningful attribute will be raised.

But now, to be honest, the whole momentum gimmick in NCAA Football 07 isn’t all that glorious. It works, and it’s a whole lot better than anything similar to it in previous sports games that feature momentum, but it’s not the game-changing factor that it is when you’re watching college football. Even with all the momentum in the world, the better and more seasoned players can get the best of anyone they face. But still, this momentum meter is a lot more realistic than say, the ‘roids in Blitz: The League or GameBreakers in EA’s Street games.

While the momentum definitely has its ability to change things up, it really isn’t the biggest welcome change in the game. You have a lot more control over your team in NCAA Football 07, especially on defense. At the line of scrimmage, you can hit the A button (X on the PS2 or PSP) to “jump the snap.” This is pretty much self-explanatory, but if you still don’t get it, jumping the snap will allow your defender to instantly get into a blitz a step faster so the offense won’t be aware of it. However, if you overuse it, the quarterback will get smart and call all sorts of silent counts on you—and with stupid penalties comes a swing of momentum, so you have to think smart.

There are some nice changes with the gameplay mechanics when you have the ball in your hands as well. The developers at EA Sports took a page out of their own book and used the right analog stick as a “trick stick” of sorts. It works exactly the same way on offense as it did in NBA Street V3 and NBA Live 06. When you have the ball in your hands passed the line of scrimmage, you can use that analog stick to do your shake and bake moves, like for juking, spinning, and such. Aside from just the stick, you can also use the left and right shoulder buttons to juke. Either way, both are great tools for avoiding would-be tacklers, and when you really learn the timing, it becomes easy. For instance, if you juke right into the defender when he’s coming, there’s a nice chance that you’ll just run him over. Or if you time your juke for what he’s about to come at you, he’ll just straight up miss. Timing is easy to master, but it gets more complicated when you use the different kinds of jukes. (You can do a lighter or quicker juke depending on how light you tap on your trick stick.)

There are also quite a few changes with the special teams as well. With other football games, special teams are oftentimes a chore because you’ll probably never return a kick or punt for a touchdown, you’ll probably never block a kick, and kicking the ball is just extremely boring. Unfortunately, nothing much has been done with the system to actually make it easier for you to score a touchdown in special teams, but everything else said is now possible. When defending a kick, you can switch into a top isometric camera view so you can see over the shoulder of the entire surrounding line. Here you can plan which lanes to run in to get a better angle at blocking the kick. If you happen to be using an extremely fast player and just so happened to jump the snap successfully, it just might pan out to be a perfectly blocked kick. And now kicking the ball is… less boring. It’s just a new system, but it’s probably the most realistic ever. You use the left analog stick to choose the direction of your kick, and you can use the right analog stick to adjust the power of where you’ll kick it. So if you apply more pressure, the kick will go further. During onside kicks, you can also decide which part of the ball you want to kick; the top, the center, or the bottom. The physics are realistic enough to plan how you want the ball to sail, so everything should work to your favor if your opponent isn’t aware of what’s going on. The wind, however, is much more of a factor than it was in previous games.

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