Backbreaker
Crippled.
Even giving the game the benefit of the doubt with this strange control system, there's always the ability to change camera angles. Right?
Sorry, pal: you're locked into a third-person view for whichever player you are controlling. You will often find yourself trying to fight over a block while a play unfolds on the other side of the screen. Even with the ability to change to a relevant player (i.e. the ball carrier or defender), I easily became disoriented long enough to miss any chance at making a play on the ball. Football is certainly a game of inches and in the virtual world, it's also a game of valuable split seconds. Backbreaker does not accommodate.
Of course, all could be forgiven if playing the game was actually fun. Sadly, the feature set is anorexic. Along with the Training Camp, you can play through two separate, but essentially equal, career modes called Season and Road to Backbreaker. Season Mode is the standard pick-your-team-and-win-the-title endeavour with very light managerial aspects thrown in, like scouting and roster editing. Road to Backbreaker is more of the same, but you'll get the chance to create your squad from scratch and pit it against up to 32 other teams.
Aside from the game's physics engine, Backbreaker can at least hang its hat on incorporating a thorough creation engine in Road to Backbreaker. You can pick team colours, edit the team logo and even choose how many star players you want. OCD creators rejoice: with enough time you can pretty much replicate anything under the sun, if the rest of the game hasn't turned you off completely by that time.
[Correction: This section also requires clarification. Teams created with the team creation engine are not restricted Road to Backbreaker mode, but can be used in Season mode, too. -Ed.]
Thankfully, playing football isn't the only thing you can do in Backbreaker, because an expanded version of the iPhone's Backbreaker Tackle Alley can also be found in this console version. The basic gist is that you must manoeuvre your lone ball-carrier across the field as increasingly dangerous waves of defenders come hurtling toward him. As addictive as it was on a mobile, Tackle Alley on a console controller lacks tactility, making pulling off jukes (left or right on the right control stick) and spins (a half circle on the right stick) an exercise in frustration.
I was often oh-so-close from reaching the end zone when, instead of spinning, my player juked and was demolished by an oncoming defender. Nevertheless, there are 100 waves to challenge yourself against and the game dangles the ability to unlock additional teams to use as a reward. (Oh great, more football teams.) You can also play Tackle Alley with or against a friend online, along with regular exhibition games. From the few games I was able to find and play, the experience is no different than playing solo, except for a few hiccups due to lag and disconnections.
But don't be fooled by such mitigating novelties: at its core, Backbreaker is a soulless attempt at straddling the fence between the over-the-top action found in the Blitz series and trying to accurately simulate the sport of football like the competition. For every amazing tackle and crushing blow that the NaturalMotion physics engine pops out, there is an equal and opposite debilitating occurrence that the developers willingly included, in good faith of course. Unfortunately, playing Backbreaker just reaffirms the quality effort, no matter how incremental in updates it may seem from year to year, that EA puts forth with each year's Madden.