APF 2K8 definitely is an interesting game. On one hand, it is one of the best playing football video games ever made. On the field, the game shines. Take NFL 2K5, fix many of its faults gameplay-wise, add a whole mess of amazing new animations (including plenty of player specific ones that look fantastic), and you have one solid gridiron experience.
Off the field, the game fumbles. The groundwork is set for a fantastic non-licensed football game, but it seems that Visual Concepts did not go that extra step to really deliver the game (with the options) that it should have.
The game offers over 250 "Legend" NFL stars from the past. You are able to create your team using 11 of those Legends as your base. Legends are broken into 3 tiers: Gold, Silver, and Bronze (depending on their skill level). You are allowed 2 gold, 3 silver and 6 bronze players on your squad. Picking and choosing how to distribute talent is one of the game's best aspects. Building your team is a whole lot of fun.
In fact, before you even make it to the main menu upon firing up the game for the first time, you need to create a team. I thought this was pretty cool. Why beat around the bush right? Creating a team with your own Legends is what this game is about, lets get right to it. It wasn't until later that I found out why the game does this. It appears that Visual Concepts (for some unknown reason) decided to ONLY let you play the game with your created team(s). Sure, there are pre-made teams that you may play against, but you cannot play as them. Those pre-made teams do not follow the 2 gold, 3 silver, 6 bronze rule that you are restricted to, which is cool and makes some teams better than others (like in the NFL). But the fact that you are restricted to using only teams you create baffles me. If your friend comes over and you want to play against him, you better hope you have more than one team created, otherwise (unless you want to pit the same team versus itself), you will have to quickly create another team for a quick versus game. And after that game is over, if you want to play another one with different teams, you are going to have to keep creating teams to use (you can create up to 8). This seems like an unnecessary restriction to put on the game, especially if all you want to do is play a few games in Quick Play. For on-line play, I agree with only allowing created teams, but off-line it is just stupid.
The game offers an impressive array of options for customizing the look of your created team, and already many people have used it to create NFL teams that look very convincing. One big issue I have though is that the game does not let you customize the generic players on your team in anyway. After you choose your 11 legends the rest of your squad is filled with generics that are created by the game. You are able to choose what you want your generic players to specialize in by squads (finesse, balanced, or power for running backs; run blocking, balanced, pass blocking for offensive linemen, etc.). That is kinda cool but very limiting at the same time. It is not very realistic for your entire squad to have similar skills. If you chose "possession" receivers for your generic wideouts, they run better routes and have better hands, but they are all painfully slow. Unless you have a speedy legend receiver on your team, your entire receiving core consist of a bunch of pretty slow guys with semi-decent hands. I would have liked a bit more variety.
Like I mentioned, you cannot customize your generics in anyway. Many times you have players on your team that share the same jersey number. That is a big no-no. If we could edit these guys we could prevent that from happening (the game should really prevent that from happening itself, no excuse for it). Another problem with the generic players is that, well, they are TOO generic. APF does not have any ratings for its players (visible ones at least). The legends are assigned a certain number of "skills" that give them certain specialties, but generics get none. And since there are no other ratings, we have no idea how good (or bad) these guys are. Does that mean that every generic receiver in the game that is a "possession" receiver has the exact same speed, hands, etc.? If so, that is incredibly lame! And it leads to my biggest gripe: season mode.
I'm a big fan of franchise modes. I'm not a big on-line gamer, so I need a pretty robust single-player experience. This game offers no franchise mode, just a season mode in which you play one season. Adding to the fact that the season mode is as barebones as it gets, you are dealing with a league that has zero history behind it and is made up (for the most part) of generic players that basically have no determinable ratings, hence, they have zero personality. Obviously the season leaders in every stat category is going to be a legend, and get ready for some amazingly inflated stats at that! Eight games into my season every single QB has a passer rating over 110!!! Warren Moon is leading the league with a 91% completion percentage! After eight freakin' games!!! Give me a break! The stats are so incredibly inflated that it kills season mode for any simulation fan. And the experience is made all the more shallow because most of your team is made up of a bunch of nobodies with no attributes, skills, or anything to make you care about them in any way. As an example, pretend you are in a game, it is 3rd and long, you only have one WR legend, but he's been double covered the entire game. Who is your next "go to" guy? The other 4 WRs on your team are generic, but in real life surely one of them has better hands than the rest. Your coach will know this. In this game, you do not. You can try to force the ball to your legend, or just hope for the best and throw it to one of your "no name" players. Now, some might say that will be your own fault for only having one legend receiver and no back-up plan. But my problem is not that I only have one star receiver, it is that I do not know at least who my second best option is. If I at least know that the guy with the 2nd best hands on my team is receive X, then even if I throw it to receiver X and he drops it, at least I know I was going to my second best option. That is all I want. I want to know who these guys are.
I am not completely against not having ratings for players. After all, what really is the difference between a 98 overall rated player and one rated 97? But I think every player needs to have some sort of scouting report, letting you know what they excel at (or don't excel at). Even if it is just something simple. For example, for your WRs you can have just a few relevant categories (hands, speed, route running, etc.) and then have a scouting report that rates them either: awful, below average, average, good, excellent, elite. That's all. Add that and all of a sudden your generic players have some traits you can look at. Keep every other rating hidden, you now at least know who your 2nd best receiver might be for a given situation. Apply this to every position and you just improved season mode by 100%. Throw in a few generics having a shot of having at least one special ability and things can get even more interesting. It could even be based on your performance on the field during a season. Have a generic TE all of sudden come down with a few nice catches over a few games and he might acquire the "Soft Hands" skill. If he doesn't keep up his performance he could lose it, but he was rewarded for his performance and that opens up the possibility of some "generic" players being diamonds-in-the-rough and actually making it to the top of some stat categories.
Another thing that could have greatly improved season/franchise mode is a little background information about this "APL" League. Maybe if you select any team and press a button, you could get a short clip of that team's strengths, their best players, how they've done the last couple of seasons and what their outlook is for this year. Blitz: The League had something similar in their marketing for that game by creating a fictional league website, with news stories and team bios. To this day that has been one of the coolest marketing ideas I have seen for a game yet, and if the game would have been a simulation of football (instead of an all out arcade-fest with cheating A.I.) I would have purchased the game in a heart-beat. APF would have greatly benefitted from some league history like that.
I don't play on-line so I cannot comment on that portion of the game, but they have on-line leagues available and if I were to play on-line, leagues is where I would want to do it.
Graphic-wise the game is a mixed bag. Overall, I am pleased with the visuals, although my first impression was that they were not very next-gen like. The more you play it though and begin to notice all the subtle details in the animations, the visuals grow on you. Up close, surprisingly, the game looks absolutely fantastic. You know how in most games the closer you zoom in the worse the graphics get (I'm looking at you Gears of War!). In APF the opposite is true. Go into replay mode and zoom in as close as you can. The level of detail and the cleanness of the textures is just phenomenal! Zoom in on the ball and it almost looks photo-realistic. You can see the seams and tread in a player's jersey and their faces react realistically when getting tackled, showing pain and closing their eyes. Animations (as I mentioned in previous posts and in the youtube video I posted) are so far beyond anything out of EA that it is almost laughable. QB's animate better than any other football game ever made. Different QB's have different throwing animations and speeds at which they are able to get the ball off. It is a beautiful thing to see. O-line and D-line interaction is again fantastic (2K5 was already great) and seeing gang-tackles again after a few years of Madden's solo-tackle extravaganza is a welcome sight. There are some negatives though. Like I said, during regular gameplay the graphics don't scream "next-gen". The grass textures are beyond terrible. The lighting is pretty blah. I don't get that great sense of "sunlight" versus stadium lights, not enough shadows on the field, etc. Stadiums are a mixed bag. Some are inspired (if not a bit over the top) and some look pretty boring. Madden definitely has this won (although they do have the benefit of having something to work off of). And my biggest graphical gripe are still the transitional animations. I guess they bother me so much because all the animations in general are so life-like, that when you see some of the transitions and how abrupt or unnatural they look, they can be a bit jarring. There is still a ton of clipping too, although mostly only noticeable in replays. Lastly, sometimes the speed of some of the tackles is too fast and violent for the momentum the tackle player had before engaging.
Audio-wise, I find a few problems with the game First off, the game's "Field-Pass" feature - which occasionally shows you cut-scenes of the players on the field either trash talking or communicating with their teammates - is terrible. It comes off as a bit corny and the player voices and personalities don't always match their real-life counterparts. Unless you are going to have the actual players record their own dialogue, then this feature should be dropped. Next up, the commentary. Dan and Peter are back from 2K5. To some that is good news. Personally, I cannot stand these two guys. At least not anymore. It doesn't help that a lot of the dialogue is recycled from 2K5. A lot. For the most part their banter just doesn't sound real. Not by a long shot. MLB: The Show's commentary has just totally spoiled me. Crowd reaction and volume is actually pretty good. My only other gripe is that I wish you could rip sections of songs from your HDD and set up the stadium to play them after certain plays (sacks, TDs, ints), that was a really, really cool and underrated feature from 2K5.
Overall, I am very grateful that 2K has decided not to abandon us fans in light of EA's NFL license acquisition (although these last 3 years have seemed very, very long). I really hope the game generates enough sales to warrant an APF 2K9 because there is a solid foundation here and huge potential for an authentic and deep football experience. Gameplay-wise, the game is solid. Not perfect, but still the most fun I have had with a football game since 2K5. With additional tweaks, a lot of added features, more customization, and a revamped engine (those grass textures are painful!), then APF will have all the tools to be the best football game ever made.
