Hands-On: NFL Street 2 Released

Hands-On: NFL Street 2 Released

I have this huge love/hate relationship with EA’s NFL Street 2. Most times I want to take the disc, break it in half, incinerate it, and then stomp on the ashes because it seems like I’m always getting the short end of the stick, but my hatred for certain aspects of the gameplay aside, I’m always lining up each and every night to play my brother in a series of hard-fought and absolutely brutal match-ups. It’s just a fast-paced and easy to play extreme sports title that’s a lot of fun, and now we’ll be able to take it on the go with the PSP version titled NFL Street 2 Unleashed. EA had it on display at a recent Sony press conference, and while the game is nowhere near finished, the developers have at the very least captured the essence of the hard-hitting football game.

Just in case you’ve never heard of or played the game, NFL Street 2 is somewhat like Midway’s NFL Blitz in that off-the-wall stuff happens, except the action never takes place in an official stadium and you can’t continue to abuse people when the play is dead. Street 2 is a celebration of backyard football, so you go to battle (7 on 7) in parks, parking lots, and city streets. You can leap off and run along walls as well as make sensational catches and dazzle your opponent with super moves called Gamebreakers. It’s a fantastic game that encourages trash talking, and while it has some nagging flaws, it’s a real bright spot in EA’s portfolio.

Ok, so now that we’ve finished with the formal introductions we can get down to business. The PSP version of NFL Street 2 retains everything from the console version (so that includes Quick Play and Own the City Mode), and also includes three new Street Events. Style Standoff is a dancing game of sorts where the goal is to perform the ultimate end zone celebrations, Street Slalom is an obstacle course, and Style Point Challenge forces you to defeat a team while the yardage to the goal line as well as the difficulty continuously ramp up.

In addition to the Street Events there are more environments that have been taken from the very first NFL Street (Courtyard and The Pit), old school teams, and WiFi support, so what we have here is the definitive title in the series, a no nonsense game of smash mouth football that hits so hard it’ll leave your opponents crying for their mommies.

While EA’s done a great job making sure this version has tons of modes/extras, it still has tons of work to do on the gameplay as well as the visuals. The game on display had been quickly put together for the event and it showed, as it ran pathetically slow and the visuals resembled that of a PSOne title, which is strange considering that screenshots put the game in the same league graphically as the PSTwo version, but such is not the case, at least not yet. Lastly, the load times were horribly long, though the representative informed me that the developers are still optimizing.

NFL Street 2 Unleashed for the PSP needs a lot of work, but even at its early stage the game looks very promising. I just hope the portable version retains the same speed and brutality as its big brother, and we’ll find out when it releases this spring, likely right alongside the PSP system.