When someone mentions EA, arcade football probably is the last thing that comes to mind. Alas, that all changes with the release of NFL Street; the pigskin edition of EA's arcade basketball phenomenon.
Instead of chaining you down to one single team, Street lets you pick and choose your fantasy football squad from a huge list of top NFL players, both past and present. As you complete tasks in NFL Challenge mode, you'll earn development points to build up your players.
Better players mean better chances at conquering the NFL Division Ladders. However, don't expect to beat Challenge mode and then whip through the ladders. The two modes must both be progressed through simultaneously in order to win, as you can't play Challenge mode without tokens, and you can't earn tokens without playing Ladder.
Also included in NFL Street are quick and pickup games. These are essentially exhibitions, the only difference being that quick games don't let you select your players, only a team. The PS2 version also has an online mode. All in all, it's a surprisingly short list of modes from the company that gives us new versions of Madden every year, but it gets the job done.
As to how NFL Street plays, well…it isn't Madden, that's for sure. EA has taken many liberties with the rules and regulations of football, perhaps even more than NFL Blitz did back before it turned to the sim side of things. Regardless, this is unmistakably an arcade style game of football, and the controls reflect that. If you've played any sort of EA football game in the past, it should seem like second nature. If not, they don't take long to learn, though a context-sensitive system would have been nice (e.g; same button for spin/juke/rip on both offense and defense, etc.)
Like its NBA counterpart, NFL Street includes the Gamebreaker, which is exactly what it sounds like: a game-altering move, accessible upon gaining enough style points. Essentially, this forces players to not only worry about gaining touchdowns, but looking good in the process as well. Trouble is, whereas a Gamebreaker was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb in NBA Street, here it seems to have been downgraded to a scud missile. It still packs a punch, but isn't the game winning maneuver it has been in the past, mostly due to the fact that it no longer saps points from your opponent's score in the process of adding to your own. A minor change, but one worth noting. Also worth noting is that after a time, the single-player mode ceases to be compelling, which means that you'd better either have 3 friends or an ethernet cable hanging around.
Street's presentation is certainly a double-edged sword – while everything is gorgeous from a technical perspective, the actual design of the game almost feels a little too contrived towards marketing to a certain audience, even by EA standards. While the hip-hop/rap school of design meshed beautifully in NBA Street, it comes off here as being a blatant boardroom-born ploy to cash in what EA marketers perceive to be "urban" culture.
A few cited examples: rap artists Xecutioners are unlockable players, players will trash talk each other in overstated street slang that makes NBA Street's Joe "The Show" look like a poet; and even the very moves you pull off in your quest for style points aren't safe from being assigned more "hip-hop sounding" names. I can understand and appreciate the concept; but at the same time, I think that EA overestimated the limit of said concept by going too over-the-top in its execution, to the point of being borderline ridiculous.
NFL Street is best experienced with friends, or (if you have a PS2) online. The single player portion is fun for a while, but it doesn't possess the same sort of staying power as a game like Madden, or even Street's NBA predecessors. The fun you can have with this game based on the multiplayer alone gets it a passing grade, but more hermit-ish football fans should rent first.
-George
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