NFL Street 2 Review

The original extreme football game NFL Blitz, started off the extreme sports phenomenon. After the release, many spin offs were produced as well as yearly sequels to Blitz. Once the next-gen consoles were introduced, more sports were added to the genre’s collection. EA took a hold of this creating the popular NBA Street franchise. Becoming overwhelmingly popular, EA created a sequel as well as a new franchise entitled NFL Street. This showed how fun games like these can be. Now that NFL Street has a sequel, it adds to the fun creating the best arcade simulation of Football of all-time.

If you were to try and compare NFL Street to a normal game football game, it doesn’t compare. For one, it seems much cartoonier than a real game, but adapts to the change fairly well. Only some of the more popular players are in the game, allowing the developer to create a truly realistic face that mirrors the life like counterpart. The bodies are developed disproportional, but for a reason. Linemen appear larger than life while Wide Receivers are small and skinny. The levels are fully intractable with the game from running up walls to making footprints in the grassy field you are playing on. All that is missing is dirtying of the uniforms and NFL Street would be amazing.

I find NFL Street 2 to be pretty basic when it comes to sound. While put together it sounds fine, but most of the bone crunching hits mirror one another. These effects are also quite similar to the original NFL Blitz that was released in 1997 on the PS1 and N64. There are a few voiceovers…and I do mean a few. The on field trash talking all uses the same voices and repeats the same things over every play. The cutscenes after the game are also repeated often due to the fact there are only 2 of them. They may feature different characters, but they all sound the same. While the soundtrack is decent, there is quite too much rap in NFL Street. Rappers are not hardcore street football players, yet this is the direction the series is taking. Keep the rappers on the basketball court, not the football field.

NFL Street 2 is just plain fun to play. The fast paced arcade gameplay plays out well with the game of football and overall brings you a quick scoring game. Defense is key in NFL Street, but is also very hit or miss at times. This is because the offense has been given so many weapons, that once the player learns to utilize them all, you will be having quite the trouble trying to stop it. Wall jukes and catches leave defenders high and dry as the player sours over the defender to make a big play, while the ability to break tackles, especially gang tackles, tends to be quite too strong. The offensive players slow down when they are showboating and makes them easy prey to tackle though. This does make up for it a bit, but not that much.

Compared to the original, Street 2 brings you many more game modes for you to take your skills to the challenge. If you wish to play a straight up normal game or NFL Challenge like the original, they are there. Own the City allows you to try and mark your turf by training a team of misfits to rule the city. Perhaps you care to take on the NFL in the NFL Gauntlet, putting you up against every NFL Team.

Open Field Challenge is a one on one mode that puts two players against each other to try and score against a lone defender. Crush the Carrier is EA’s take on Kill the Man with the Ball, making you have to hold onto it the longest in order to win. 4v4 is just like a normal NFL Street game, except you play with 4 players instead of 7 and the QB cannot run the ball. Jump Ball mode puts the player in a scramble to try and catch passes with other players, trying to get the most you can in the allotted time. 2 minute challenge gives you 2 minutes to try and score as many TD’s as possible. Scoring challenge is a 2v2 version of Open Field that plays like a shootout with 5 chances to score. The best part of NFL Street 2 is the online mode that allows you to play all of the game modes, as well as use your NFL Challenge team online. It is quite sad however that there are never that many people playing it though. All of this may sound like fun, but it keeps you interested for about a week or so. A perfect rental for any of those interested in trying NFL Street 2.