- Title: NFL Head Coach
- Platform: Xbox, PS2
- Publisher: EA
- Developer: EA Tiburon
- ESRB: “E” For Everyone
- Genre: NFL football coaching sim
- Pros: Very deep, satisfying when you get into it
- Cons: Bland presentation, watching videogame football isn’t nearly as fun as actually playing
Single Player
NFL Head Coach has you doing pretty much everything a real coach does and then some in order to put together the best team each Sunday. This includes choosing the right assistant coaches and trainers, dealing with agents and players, scouting new players, drafting players, running meetings, keeping players motivated with pep talks, calling the plays each Sunday along with much, much more.
Multiplayer
Along with the huge single-player mode there is also online multiplayer. In this mode you just call the plays and work on overall strategy but unlike a normal football game you are completely at the mercy of the AI and the stat sheets. If you pick a bad team, they are going to play bad no matter what you do. If you pick a good team, you should be able to roll over most people. Pitting your coaching prowess against others on Xbox Live is a cool idea, but it isn’t really all that fun in practice.
Issues
My biggest problem with NFL Head Coach is that once you get through the tedious micro-management stuff and actually get to gameday, the action on the field isn’t really all that good. Simply put, the AI players are morons. You can call the plays and give pep talks on the sideline, but having to rely on the AI to make good plays and actually play an exciting game of football is extremely aggravating.
Graphics and Sound
The presentation is another weak point in NFL Head Coach. The management aspects are just a maze of menus and nothing you see or do is really all that intuitive. It takes a while before you know what everything does and where everything is in the menus. Most of your time is spent looking at menus but you’ll also see some bland shots of your office or the team conference room every now and then.On gameday, the game looks and sounds just like a Madden game but without all of the polish we have come to expect. There are a lot of graphical glitches and clunky animations that we wouldn’t see if this was a Madden game. One nice aspect is that you have a ton of camera angles to choose from while you watch the game including sideline and broadcast shots that do a great job of emulating what we see on TV.
Bottom Line
