THIS is competition?
Head to head, the two "pro" football games out this season -- Madden NFL 08 and All-Pro Football 2K8 -- are so mismatched, bookmakers in Vegas wouldn't even take any action. It's like the world-champion Indianapolis Colts playing a Pop Warner team of malnourished 8-year-olds. "Slaughter" is putting it lightly.
Named for the Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster John Madden, the Madden series of NFL games has been around since 1989, each year fine-tuning itself, creating a juggernaut football title that is so widely anticipated each year, its release date is an unofficial holiday (Happy belated Maddenoliday! It happened Aug. 14.).
All-Pro Football, on the other hand, is the resurrection of a franchise that was called ESPN Football in years past. Before its demise after the 2005 version, the ESPN series was showing a ton of promise with its original features and gameplay. But alas, when the exclusive rights to make NFL-licensed games were snapped up by Electronic Arts (the makers of Madden), Visual Concepts and 2K Games were left with a pro football game with no teams.
So was born the idea for All-Pro Football. Using retired NFL players, familiar players could be used to populate what was an already promising game. But along the way, either the developers forgot what worked in the past or tried too hard to reinvent the wheel, and what's left is this marginally exciting title whose flaws are far more glaring next to the golden god that is the Madden series. In All-Pro, players' limbs travel through their opponents, ruining any kind of realism. And the player renderings make most of the NFL greats look more like caveman lawyers than hall of famers.
The gameplay feels extremely retro, and not just because it features retired players. The action is choppy, and there is little else to do other than play regular football, with the exception of a standard "create a player" mode.
Eliminate the decent next-gen graphics, and a more fitting title might be All-Pro 1998.
The Madden disc, meanwhile, not only offers perfect football gameplay, it also gives numerous ways to get a complete NFL experience. Want to create a rookie who plays his way into superstardom? Want to manage a current franchise and lead it to the promised land with shrewd drafting and player signings? How about taking the reins of every aspect of an NFL franchise, building a team, designing the stadium, even setting the concession stand prices? All this for the same price as APF2K8.
