Rugby 08

Rugby 08 - (PC, PS2)
Developer: EA
Format: PC, PS2
Genre: Rugby

Grown men, oddly shaped balls and some fiddly gameplay!

Barring the blood, sweat and tears of a real game, this gets pretty close. The sticking point though is that if you've played Rugby 06 then you'll quickly get the nagging sensation that you've seen this all before. And back then you probably bemoaned the lack of a decent tournament mode. Well, be prepared - there isn't one here either. You'll have to make do with a reasonable World Cup and a nifty Challenge mode that let's you relive matches from the last five years with unlockable video content from those games. This is a true Rugby connoisseurs dream. Elsewhere though, casual players are forgotten. Alongside other sports titles on the next gen consoles the graphics just feel a little outdated - crowd backdrops in particular, are woeful.

Gameplay is very fluid with tackles and kicks given a noticeable tweak and in the heat of the match you certainly get a buzz from the action, but there's still a fair amount of annoying button bashing in the scrum situations and often you'll be throwing the controller at the screen with the seemingly arbitrary nature of who comes out top in each one. And the AI is great when it works and downright strange when it doesn't - don't be surprised to find an opponent suddenly right on top of you when moments ago he seemed half the field away.

Elsewhere a flawed camera angle on penalty kicks disappoints and you really want some sort of tournament leader board here to lift the game up. Overall it feels like it's just a rehash, although a pretty playable one at that but it's for die-hard Six Nations fans only.

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