AFL Live 2011

Review from AJ - Sunday, 15 May 2011 @ 6:23am

AFL Live is almost like watching the real thing. It’s fast paced, action packed and you have no control over any of it. With no tutorial, horrible instructions and unnecessarily complicated control scheme, AFL Live fails to live up to what should’ve been a revival of AFL games. Plenty of people will defend the fact that these local games don’t have the budget of the big EA titles, and they’d be right. Unfortunately, the problems with AFL Live have almost nothing to do with the production values, and everything to do with just being poorly designed.

I’m a big AFL fan...well I should say, I’m a big Bombers fan. Any other club I couldn’t give a toss about. I don’t care that my favourite players looking nothing like their digital versions. I don’t care that the crowds are all duplicates of each other, and I don’t really care that the animations are repetitive and distinctly low-budget. But I do care that I find the game almost impossible to control. It took an entire season to even begin feeling like I knew what I was doing. It’s not just a steep learning curve, it’s a colossal mountain. No game should take this long to get used to. The simple fact is that if I weren’t reviewing it, I’d have given up a long time before I did.

Before I continue bashing the controls, it’s worth pointing out that AFL Live does a lot right. I think it’s been about 4-5 years since the last AFL game came out, and it that makes this one easily the best to date. Of course, that’s not saying much in a genre that has had more failures than successes. I still think the simplistic NES era interpretations have been the best for a long time, most likely because the simplistic interpretation means less complication.

The graphics in AFL Live are the best to date: the presentation is slick, the stadiums look great, and the players, whilst looking nothing like their real life counterparts, at least look and move a little like humans. The commentary, though repetitive and somewhat redundant, lends a certain credibility to the game. Sadly the same phrases pop up over and over, and when you’re playing through an entire season this can get a little annoying. But as far as commentary goes, BT and Dennis Cometti do a good job.

Ok, I think I’m done with the positives....

The first thing that really struck me was that this game is not a “pick up and play” type game. It’s hard. That in itself is ok, but there is no tutorial, no video walkthrough and there’s no in-game example of what to do or when (except strangely for kick ins and tap outs.). This is compounded by the fact that the developers felt the need to combine thumb sticks, shoulder buttons and face buttons in all sorts of weird combos to enable a fairly basic set of actions. Literally the only way to learn the game is to look at the controller layout menu and figure it out from there.

The controls are loosely mapped around whether you have the ball or not. So if you have the ball, this is the set of buttons, and if you don’t you have this set of buttons. In some instances this means too many buttons are required to perform all the possible actions available to a player. So whilst a mark is the Triangle button (PS3 here), to spoil you hit Triangle + L1. I can’t even remember which one that is half the time I might add. The reason this is stupid is because the you have to remember every possible action a player can make rather than the “intent”.

I would’ve much preferred the layout to be more consistent based around “attack” and “defense”, or “primary” and “secondary” actions. X is default action. I have the ball, that’s a kick. The ball is in the air that’s a mark. I’m chasing down a player, that’s a tackle. The ball is lose on the ground, that’s pick it up. You could then happily play the game solely with the X button. You could then have Square as the secondary button. Spoil, handball, bump, soccer off the ground. That’s it. That’s your buttons. Instead AFL Live requires remembering 3 different layouts and a random assortment of button combos just to be able to play a single game....and, let me reiterate, all without a tutorial.

It’s great to be able to do things like target a player to kick to, or switch players during play, but unfortunately AFL is far too fast and played over far too wide an area for this to work in a game. More often than not you’re kicking to a contest you can’t even see on the screen. By the time the ball gets to the desired player, he’s now heavily under attack and you need to remember whether it was L1, L2 or neither to mark. Of course, most of the time it doesn’t matter what you press. Your player will stand still whilst his opponent takes another spectacular grab.

And yet strangely, the developers got some things really right. Ball ups work wonderfully, and are the only part of the game where you fell you actually have any control over what’s going on. It has on screen instructions, vibration feedback to tell you when to jump AND best of all, you can actually see the players you can tap too. It’s almost as if this part of the game was done by an entirely different development team. It’s that different.

Of course, a lot of the failings of the game stem from a far too literal translation of the game. In the real game, players are given a very short amount of time to move the ball on after a mark, or from a kick in. In a game where most of your team mates aren’t visible and you can’t remember which button is which, the standard 10 seconds from mark to kick is far too short. In reality, the game should pause, give you a chance to look around and select where to kick it to and then let you take your kick. Instead, 99% of the time you’re forced to kick it to the general direction of your goal and hope for the best. In a sport that relies so heavily on player position, timing and delivery of the ball...removing all of these factors form the decision process essentially turns every contest into a coin flip.

Having simulator like controls, substitutions, team tactics and the plethora of AFL rules, injuries and player stamina to deal with would suggest that AFL Live is an uber-AFL-Simulator. Unfortunately, it’s not. Beyond the standard Season and Quickplay, there really are no other modes to speak of. There is no career mode, no challenge mode, no “get your team from wooden spoon to premiership” mode, just game after game of the same thing. In fact, the only mode that differs at all is the so called “practice match”. Which is exactly the same, but with fewer players on the field and no crowd. Oh and it’s not much good for practice, because it doesn’t provide any feedback as to what you’re doing right or wrong.

Look, I’m not normally one to rant about poor games. But I honestly had high hopes for this game. When you walk into JB or EB and see signs up saying “SOLD OUT, pre-order for next shipment” you think, “wow, this must actually be a really good game”. Sadly, it’s not...at all. It’s possible that AFL Live 2012 may be better, but this one isn’t great. There’s certainly a foundation of a good game, and it certainly must’ve sold well enough to warrant another edition. So I guess all I can do is cross my fingers and hope that the next iteration fixes all the stuff that’s broken in this one.

Pros

• Best AFL game to date
• Pretty good graphics
• Great ad campaign made the game look deceptively good.
• Reasonably good...umm... theme music?

Cons

• Terrible controls
• Terrible AI
• Terrible selection of modes
• Terrible amounts of terrible