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Apr 11 2005
NFL Street 2 Unleashed Review
PSP Game Review | Sports
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| Summary: Let the games begin!
90
Pop in NFL Street 2 Unleashed and you immediately get a sense of what the game is all about -- showing off, crazy plays, jukes, wall hurdles and then some. NFL Street offers a fresh perspective on a classic sport, and this PSP translation has an incredible assortment of gameplay modes that should keep any football fan happy.
Even if you've played a previous Street game, you'll want to take the tutorial to get a feel for the game and how gameplay works on the PSP. If you don’t feel like finishing it all at once, then you can go to game modes, and finish up the tutorials you didn’t finish. You also get 30,000 credits for finishing it, which are used to buy new clothes and apparel for your rising football team.
The game is made up of 3 different modes, Quick Game, Own the City and Street Events. Whether you have time for a quick game or a more in-depth match, there is something for you.
The quick game is just your standard game of NFL street where you can flex your moves and test out your team when you have a few minutes to burn.
In this career mode, you start as a regular guy with a lot of aspiration to have the best street team. Of course there is no such thing as a one-man football team so you have to go recruiting talented players from pickup games. Before we get to the game modes, however, let's go over the ways you can customize your team.
You earn money from any of the other modes you play which you use to buy yourself some clothes to improve your team's style. You can choose from hats, shirts, jackets, shoulder pads, shoes, socks, shorts and even watches and chains -- your typical bling bling street stuff. Once you buy an accessory, you can equip your entire team with it. You also get Dev points in each game during own the city mode, use these to max out your character.
After all that you can pick your team logos and colors. This is a quick process as the logos are your regular snakes and skulls, nothing that’s insanely cool. Then you're off to a game. Pickup games are played to recruit talent. Based upon a variety of stats and strengths, you make your team from a group of players. Remember however, that your players can play both defense and offense. Be sure to pick players with good tackling and offensive stats. After the game is over, you can pick new players to recruit to your team. After a few games you have a street challenge, which we'll cover shortly. Once you have recruited four people you can play your first real game. Progress in the game follows this pattern of recruiting better teammates and playing better teams.
There are a total of nine street events for you to participate in, all of which will help you to hone your skills.
Crush the Carrier
It’s a six man brawl for the ball. The longer you hold onto the ball the more points you earn. Do style moves to increase your point total. However, don’t just hang back and wait for someone to fumble the ball, you get big points for tackling the player with the ball. The player with the most points at the end of a 3 minute round wins.
Jump Ball Battle
Your player has to have a good catching stat, because these quarterbacks are launching passes high, low, fast, slow and everything else. Snag the most balls to win.
Open Field Showdown
A 1 on 1 brawl to see who the better overall football player is, show them your stiff arm, jukes, wall hurdles, anything to get to the endzone. Then you have to be ready for them while you're on defense. Try to tackle them before they reach the endzone. Whoever gets the most TD’s out of a certain amount of tries, wins.
Style Standoff
This is pretty much a game of copycat. You see your player and your opponent from a front angle. Your opponent does a move, you copy it, if you copy it, you go on. He does the same move plus another move, and you keep adding on moves until you can’t handle the style.
Street Slalom
A tough obstacle course down an alley is placed before you, make it to the end before time runs out. You’ll need all your jumping, juking, and wall hurdling skills here.
2:00 Minute Challenge
Score as many touchdowns as you can in two minutes. After you score a TD your opponent gets the ball, so you better get your defensive skills ready too. The timer never stops, so you won’t have time to think about your plays.
Style Point Challenge
It isn’t all about scoring touchdowns, style is also important. Here the objective is to get as many style points as you can in a single play. The goal starts at 500 during your first play, then it keeps getting higher with each play. You have three chances if you fail to get enough style points, but you get another chance with each 50,000 style points.
4 on 4
A four on four game of football. It’s a wide open field, so speed is of the essence. Think that throwing is the best way to score some TD’s? Maybe, but you better be quick about it, you only get 5 seconds to throw the ball, and you can’t decide to run off with the ball if no one is open.
Quick Strike
This is a fast-paced, intense game. When you score, your opponent has to score as well or they're out. If neither of you score, or if both of you score, the game goes on until the tie is broken. Each person has one chance to create a tie. For example, if player 1 scores a TD on his first drive, then player 2 has a chance to tie the score and the game continues.
NFL Challenge
This mode is very complex and requires a lot of strategy. All 32 NFL teams have been invited to a tournament in your city. However there is one problem -- one of the teams cannot make it. Your team is the lucky winner and you get to replace the team. You have 150 days to improve the stats of your team and unlock many items. Each game takes a certain amount of days, and some give you different players while others unlock things in a tech-tree style way, while others give your entire team stat bonuses, such as +1 blocking. This mode's tech-tree allows you to earn gear bonuses, which help a lot.
NFL Gauntlet
Pick a team and take on all 32 NFL teams to unlock rewards and gain money and style points.
Pickup Game
This is like Own the City’s games. You draft a team from a random pool of players and play football.
Tutorials
Just in case you didn’t finish them or you just need to go back to practice a certain skill.
While this may seem like a lot of modes, you can quickly pick up the objective and focus on improving your skills.
The controls in this game are hard to get used to. The D-pad’s movements are blocky, and it’s easy to accidentally press the wrong button and run into a wall. Using the analog nub isn’t a great alternative as the player’s movements are very sensitive, and you often find yourself doing things you don’t want. The difficult controls end up making all the wall jumps, spin moves, style, and different button combos somewhat of a challenge. Often times you’ll end up making unwanted moves, but eventually you will get used to the controls.
For different street events you also want to use either the D-pad or the analog nub. Some of them require precise, quick actions for which the analog stick works best, while others require consistency which the D-pad is best at, and some modes are easy to play no matter which you use.
Throwing the ball is one of the simpler and more effective moves in the game. Tap circle, square, or x for a touch pass, and hold them down for a bullet. Simply tap triangle for a pump fake, hold L and press circle, square, or x to do a style throw, do a wall hurdle and press circle, square, or x to do a wall throw. Passes are usually on target and don’t require huge levels of precision, when you see your guy open, tap his that button and the ball should be there.
The graphics are actually pretty good for the amount of action going on. The playing fields are varied and unique, which keeps the gameplay from getting stale. Player graphics are detailed from the playing view, however when you initiate the gamebreaker mode, the camera zooms in and the graphics become quite jagged. Also, the bystander graphics could have been a lot better, rather than static and blurry 2D figures. Framerates are great, there isn’t a single choppy moment, action is fluid, making the spins, jukes, and bone crushing hits look all the more realistic.
Being EA, you can’t expect this game to have a soundtrack that isn’t comprised of a variety of semi-commercial rock, rap and hip-hop tracks not unlike previous Madden games. Most of the tracks are good, but some of them aren’t. Luckily, there's the handy EA Pocket-Trax manager under the options button. You can preview the music there, and turn off all the songs that make yours ears hurt.
In-game sound is also very good. Players grunt when tackling or getting hit, and there are different sounds for various actions. You can even hear your player running along the walls. Catching the ball doesn’t sound realistic, but then again it rarely does in any sports game.
On the downside, the loading times get old very quickly. Also, the controls add an element of difficulty and require some learning to get used to. You can't change the keys, so you will have to get used to the control setup. On the upside, the soundtrack is spot on. The wide variety of gameplay modes not only give NFL Street 2 great replay value, but it is also a game you can pickup for short or long play sessions. This is a great game for any football fan, especially those interested in taking a little break from the norm.
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Comments
04/11/05
14 
whatever
| UK
Damn that's a long review.
I think you covered everything in the game :-)
What's the overall score?
+
04/11/05
13
captain
| 
| Ontario Canada
04/11/05
4
jasiu
| Wisconsin USA
thanks, it was my first one. i got some help from my brother.
+
04/11/05
2
philip
| Illinois USA
nice review! but i have a question......how hard is this game???
+
04/12/05
4
jasiu
| Wisconsin USA
easy at first, but later it starts to get harder. The opponents offense tends to increase slowly, but their defense gets better pretty quickly. The long full field touchdown runs are pretty much non-existent unless you use gamebreaker.
+
04/14/05
19
Agent808
| Hawaii USA
let me say this. i have never enjoyed football games, from tecmo bowl to madden 05 i cant get into it. i'm not much of a sports fanatic either. my brother on the other hand lives for sports games like madden and he ended up picking up this game. anyways, i seriously enjoyed this game a lot. i never played the console version but i know that this game is just flat out enjoyable. lots of different game options from smear the quear style gaming, one on one, some dance memory game, and lots more. i dont know how to say it but this is a great game for any sports fans. me liking this game either means, it sucks for regular sports game fans, or that it is truly a great game. i'd say its about a 7 or 8 out of 10. i'm saving my rating of 9 and 10 for games like GT4 mobile and grand theft auto hehe.
+
04/14/05
4
jasiu
| Wisconsin USA
the console version is alot less fun then this one. The fact that you can just pick it up play a couple downs, and turn it off is alot more fun then having to play an entire game at once
+
04/28/05
12
bigpimpin
| Alberta Canada
is this game better than nba street showdown?
+
05/19/05
4
jasiu
| Wisconsin USA
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