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After spending last season warming the next-gen bench while its professional cousin, Madden Football, got all the glory on the 360, EA’s NCAA Football 07 is ready to take to the high-definition field. And this long-running series is doing it in style.

The Casual Fan

The best way to describe this year’s NCAA is user friendly. Particularly if you’re one of the more casual armchair quarterbacks around. NCAA doesn’t ask you to memorize the playbooks of your favorite schools in order to find success. Instead it gives you the option of grouping plays based on a particular style. If you know you want a running play, you can just choose that group. Wanna use that cannon your quarterback calls his arm to gain big yardage? Just choose the passing group. And so on and so forth.

NCAA makes things even easier, though, by giving you a group of up to five suggested plays for every situation, be they on offense or defense. But none of this catering to the casual affects the experience for the hardcore college fans out there, as the best way to lead your squad through a successful season is still to know your players and playbook inside and out.

Drama, Thy Name is NCAA

Something EA Sports is really crowing about in this year’s NCAA is the momentum meter, which actually boosts player stats based on the pace and various successes or failures throughout the course of a game. Make a big play to avoid a conversion on the fourth down, for instance, and the momentum will swing your way. Not to mention you’ll drive your fans wild in the process.

But honestly, it doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on any given contest, since key interceptions and devastating fumbles happen with alarming frequency no matter which team has momentum on their side. Get too far ahead of your opponent and you can almost certainly count on a miraculous pass interception by the opposing team that will lead to a quick TD, or at least a field goal.

It’s all very dramatic and exciting if it happens to go your way, but it does get old after a while. Plus it feels like manufactured drama…as though the game is programmed to do this should certain parameters be met during the second half of any event.

Eye On the Ball

Graphically, NCAA delivers for the most part. The stadiums that have been modeled on their real-life counterparts – the Swamp down in Florida, Michigan’s Big House – look absolutely fantastic if you’re playing on a nice, big HD set. The presentation is also slick and professional, looking like something you’d see on one of the big networks. The players, too, look great while out on the field, despite a few strange clipping problems when they get jumbled together.

One of the more bizarre graphical issues, though, is the strange frame-rate stutter when the camera swings around to show the crowd, or for a wide shot of the stadium you’re currently playing in. It’s a real shame, too, since most of these venues look so spectacular.

The other noticeable issue is the tackling animation, which doesn’t look impressive at all. Most of the time, a “tackle” is simply two bodies more or less running into one another. It doesn’t really affect the game play, but it is a noticeable flaw.

Rookie Sensation

It goes without saying that NCAA on the Xbox 360 will be a huge hit no matter how good or bad it is. It’s nice to see that EA is still working on improving the franchise, however, and they’ve delivered a generally solid product here that manages to sidestep the rookie woes most first-run sports titles suffer from on new hardware. Consider it an apology for EA’s underwhelming 360 sports lineup last year.

Article by: Greg Sewart
Video produced by: Tim Jennings