Head Coach — Off the Field
I’m sure by now some of you have the game and are tooling around with it. For those still on the fence, well, so am I and I’ve had it for a couple of days now.
On the field, I’m not sold yet. I haven’t played enough games in order to categorize the oddities as blatant flaws or the unpredictable nature of football. Until I can classify something as a pattern I think it’s unfair to slam it outright.
The “office” portion of the game is pretty deep. I think the interface is a mangled mess, comlete with oodles of time wasting animations such as hand shaking new coaches and watching fired coaches get up and leave, but that’s what you get with a big(er) budget sports strategy game — you get needless, time wasting animations.
On day one of my tenure as new Browns coach I fired pretty much my entire staff. This game HATES Cleveland. I dunno if every teams’ coaches are like this but based on the Browns coach roster, the team is lucky to get to the stadium on time. Also, based on roster strength, the game has the Browns as the worst team in the league. Even if you aren’t convinced that the Browns are a playoff team, do you really think they’re the worst team in football? They did draft 11th ya’ know.
Anyway, some funny stuff: I fired a lot of coaches and then turned around and hired Romeo Crennnel to lead the defense. Ha. He would have taken a job as the LB coach! Seems a tad odd to me.
The office portion is broken down into tasks and you can only do such much each day. After firing like 7 coaches I didn’t have enough time to interview and hire all of the guys I needed before the owner got mad. You also just can’t sit back and play sandbox with your playbook. When you alter it it eats up your allowed tasks.
One thing that could be problematic is the owner goals. My owner wants me to win 8 games, draft a 75+ rated QB, and finish in the top 8 in sacks allowed and rushing yards. All well and good (the top 8 thing is kinda silly but hey…owners are a fickle lot). What could suck is if I somehow make the playoffs with the lowly rated Charlie Frye, finish 15th in sacks and say, 18th in rushing. Will the owner still get pissed? I know you’re thinking, “no way” but remember NHL 2005? If you didn’t follow the task list you got fired, regardless of how well your team did. Hopefully Head Coach will not follow the same pattern.