With last year’s title being nothing short of disappointing, fans of NCAA Football 08 where hoping for something more with this release. Fortunately for all of us, EA Sports made some huge strides from last year to provide us with a solid, enjoyable, and much deeper game this time around. One of the new features this year is the big hit ability. With a swift push of the thumb stick you can land a devastating hit with your MLB on a Wide Receiver coming down the middle. On the offensive side, you can use the same thumb stick to juke, stiff arm, and quickly interrupt your actions to swiftly move past the defenders in front of you. This though, while being a nice feature has its flaws. Sometimes you juke straight out of bounds and that ends your play prematurely, sometimes for a loss of yards which is really annoying. One feature that is not present in this game that was last year is the momentum system. This year, the new Motivation mechanics where introduced. Every time the user makes a tackle, makes catches, picks off a pass, a motivational boost is given to the player allowing him a better chance to make spectacular plays and it also influences players around them. Sadly, this feature is used sparingly throughout the game. You really never notice it too much throughout a season.

NCAA Football 08 Revives The Struggling Franchise

For those of you who remember last year, all animations had to be completed before proceding to the next which quickly got annoying. This year, players can interrupt their moves and cut in opposite directions or juke immediately after cutting providing a smoother game and a definite improvement over last year. To compensate defensively, NCAA 08 places an emphasis on gang tackles so players will find themselves getting plummeted by two or three defenders when going up the middle for a pass or hitting the secondary after a big gain. While on topic, the mid-air collisions are gorgeous this game. Overall, this game is the most hard hitting NCAA 08 game in a while, if not of all time. This is the perfect game to try out those new trick plays like the Statue of Liberty and the Lateral.

As far as Presentation, the new highlight reel allows you to create and store your best plays of the game for later viewing and bragging to your friends on Live. Even better, play on Live and beat up on your buddy and never let him hear the end of it. Every time he comes to your house you can show him the highlight film, over and over again. Also, the Weather Channel has been including in this game allowing for real time updates of the weather. If its raining in your team’s stadium, you are going to play in the rain this week on NCAA 08.  The highlight reel suffers in some ways from bad camera angles that requires manual adjustment. This does not take away from the feature, but it does show that it could be implemented better.