Customer Reviews

NFL Head Coach

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I'd been looking forward to NFL Head Coach since I first read about it several months ago. After maxing out my Madden skills, I found myself rushing through each season of my dynasty just to get to the draft and free agency. I loved seeing my team take shape year to year, patting myself on the back when my vision paid off and muttering when I had to discard my busts to the waiver wire. NFL Head Coach was going to be just what I needed to satisfy my inner obsessive football fan.

Well, the game unfortunately suffers from a big case of the woulda-shoulda-coulda's. EA had a great idea and clearly worked very hard on it, but ended up with something that's not much more satisfying than the dynasty tasks in Madden and ultimately not very much fun to play.

You start out your career by creating a coach. There are numerous ways to tweak your coach - probably too many. I don't much care how wide my coach's mouth is, what shape his eyebrows are, or how chubby his cheeks are. They probably should have just made more presets and let you pick one. You also must choose what outfits your coach will wear to the office. . . and to practice. . . and to the games in warm weather. . . and to the games in cold weather. Suddenly you're transported into NFL Dress-Up. Uh-oh.

The next step is to interview for a head coach position. This will be your first introduction to the dialogue system which dominates most of the gameplay. In this case, the questions posed by the team's owner appear on the screen and then you pick a canned response. If he likes what you have to say, your coaching attributes will go up and you're more likely to get a job offer. This back and forth is a repeated theme throughout the game, whether you're dealing with a player's agent or one of your coordinators, it's always this cross between the Sims and a multiple-choice quiz. Actually, not even multiple-choice because many screens full of words end with you only have one choice like "OK" or "Let's go do this."

So much of this game comes down to these scripted exchanges and it's the first of its many lost opportunities. There should be some animations or even video instead of two static figures sitting in chairs blocked out by a screen covered in words. It's a setup which does nothing to make you feel engaged in the game.

Once you choose a team to command, you must build your staff. You hold a meeting with all of your coordinators and coaches where you introduce yourself to each individually and then either a) tell him his job is safe, or b) tell him that he's out of a job. The way that this is presented, you're firing people in front of the entire staff - how awkward! But dont' get too happy with the hatchet man routine because you've only got a few days to interview and hire candidates.

So how do you know who's available for these jobs? Enter your Personnel Director, or as I've come to call him Mr. Obstacle or The Dumbest Guy in the World. He'll email you a list of potential candidates each morning, even after you've filled a specific position. He also highly recommends the guys that you just let go yesterday. But don't let his behavior get your blood pressure up yet - save that for the draft. Oh, and by the way, he's the only position that you can't fire.

Interviewing coaches also highlights how subpar the interface and flow of the gameplay is. You're given a list of names as candidates with absolutely no additional knowledge about them other than what their strongest attribute is. What happens when you ask your potential defensive coordinator his 3-4/4-3 preference and he disagrees with you? Why did I bring you in at all? So you blindly guess who you want to interview and then proceed to march through some Q&A - Q&A that makes no sense, that is, because everyone gets the same interview no matter which position they're after. So you'll ask your linebackers coach about how he'd improve the kicking game and your quartebacks coach about whether he prefers zone or man-to-man coverage in the defensive backfield. This glaring inconsistency is the first of many that really cast the game's claims of being the ultimate football sim in a suspicious light. And when you're finished interviewing, he demands an answer right then and there. So it's either hire him on the spot or let him go never to be heard from again. This meant that I oftentimes ended up hiring whoever came in on Friday but wished that I'd hired the guy from Wednesday when I had my chance.

Your days as coach are mapped out in excruciating detail on your calendar. You spend a lot of times in meetings or in what's called "office hours". Each of these activities is then broken down into a number of tasks depending on how much time was assigned. Once you use up your tasks, you're finished with that activity and you move on to the next. Unfortunately, the definition of "task" is ridiculously specific here. For instance, if you want to make some changes to your depth chart, each swap counts as its own task. You only get two tasks per office hour, so swapping out a deep positions such as your wideouts could literally take you several days.

It's also frustrating that you can only perform the tasks associated with whatever activity you're in at that time. So you may get an email on Monday indicating that another team has made you a trade offer. But you can't actually respond and begin hammering out the deal until Thursday, which is when you have time assigned for the "trade" activity each week.

The AI for the off-season work is ridiculous. Your personnel man will meet with you weekly and offer up a list of no-names in positions that anyone could see you don't even need. When you get to the draft, he sulks in his responses when you don't take his every recommendation, saying things like "I like Smith the RB, but I'm sure that you'll pick someone else because you know so much." At least every other team is apparently saddled with the same level of competency. The draft results are incredibly unrealistic: Reggie Bush typically sits around until the high teens while D'Brickashaw Ferguson is usually a late 1st/early 2nd rounder. More in-your-face evidence that isn't the perfect football sim that it claims to be. There should be an option to have the teams draft as they really did in the NFL this year barring any variations that you throw into the mix, but there isn't.

Scouting players highlights yet another oddity about the game. First off, where's the combine? You prepare a list of players that you want to evaluate, but are then handed a message about how "only the Personnel Director goes to the combine". This was another great opportunity for cutscenes or even mini-games, but instead, it's just more reading reports over the same old screen of your coach sitting in his office. The real problem is that you don't get any actual combine numbers - just videogame rankings from 1-100. How disappointing that a self-proclaimed sim would actually provide you less real data than its Madden counterpart (where you can actually play the games, don't forget).

The draft plays pretty well, although it is a lengthy prospect and you'll want to turn off the choppy Mel Kiper sound clips after about five picks ("that's a fine pick that . . . Cleveland. . . just got for themselves in the . . . third. . . round"). There is no option to speed through other teams' picks, so even at 40 seconds per pick, you'll be sitting there for 20 or so minutes between actually making a pick. You can attempt to trade with other teams during the draft, but you rarely can hammer out a deal in the short amount of time that other teams have. So forget about moving up to get a specific player. A better system would have been to give every team the 5 minutes per pick that you automatically have and then give you a 'skip' function if you don't want to deal with a particular team. Also, there is a completely different look to how player info is presented in this game - different, but much worse. Rather than a simple sortable list of player data like every other sports game has used for some time, NFL Head Coach uses a field of icons representing players. You move about the icons trying to search for specific information, which is never easy and forget about making side-by-side comparisons of players. The developers of this game worked very hard to make this something other than a Madden clone but what they came up with manages to be different but not better.

The rest of the Summer is spent with drab camp and practice activities. Once the season starts, you gameplan during the week and then patrol the sidelines during the contests. Coaching during the games is far from perfect, but it's a welcome break from looking at your coach sit in the office for hours. Each game takes about 40 minutes. You can call plays, make substitutions, and give pep talks to players on the sidelines. Each talk will result in either a plus or minus appearing above the players' heads, another nod to the familiar Sims setup. However, with no feedback given on why a particular message worked or failed, and with very little consistency on how messages are received, this is not very useful.

Your ultimate aim is to have your year-round success catapult you into the Coaching Hall of Fame. Actually advancing into the top ten would take multiple seasons, a feat I can't imagine many will actually have the time to do.

CONCLUSION
EA was clearly concerned that people would out this game as a simple adaptation of Madden with simmed games. So, they decided to make everything in the interface different. However, different doesn't equate with better in this case. Data is very awkward to sort, search and retrieve and too much of the game is spent reading conversations on-screen. The AI is also terrible, which deflates the game's value as a true NFL sim. I suppose that it is a sim in the sense that you're acting like you have a job and this game sure does feel like work.

PROS
* NFL Films score throughout gives a legitimate football feel to the game - thankfully, EA Trax were given a vacation for this title
* The game is scripted to provide you with on-the-fly tutorials, minimizing the learning curve

CONS
* The game is simply boring, relying too much on text conversations on-screen as your virtual coach sits static in his office
* Despite the emphasis on this being a football sim, it's more videogame-y than its counterpart Madden in many ways, e.g. the 1-100 ratings of attributes rather than authentic combine stat categories.
* Load time are atrocious and numerous throughout gameplay
* No combine-related activities makes the offseason seem incomplete
* AI is terrible, making it difficult to guage what your opponents are likely to do both on the field and during the draft.

I was really looking forward to this game because I play Madden in "sim mode" all the time because I like the strategy aspect of the game more so than I like the "video game" aspect. I was in for a big surprise, however. I knew I was in trouble when I was interviewd for the head coach position of the Oakland Raiders and expected to be across the table from "The GodFather", Al Davis. But no, some guy names "Marquis" with a white beard.

Not good.

The graphics quality is what Madden was back in '01/'02 - which is good, but not what we expect. The roster functionality will frustrate you to death - you just can't see what is going on with your roster as easy as you can with Madden.

Here is what I liked:

- Interaction with Agents. I loved this. You are able to negociate with the agents, and if the deal isn't perfect, the "call you back". I hope Madden has this.
- Emails from other GMs offering trades. This is also a nice touch and an area Madden has suffered in. The problem is, the email says to call them back, but when you attempt to, you are informed you can't do that yet.
- I like the meetings with the owners, coaches and scouts. I also liked at the beginning when you were able to choose who you wanted to keep, and who you wanted to fire. Nicely done.
- there are some great quotes from past coaches that are in the "waiting" screens. For example, "The only time success comes before work is in the dictionary." - Vince Lombardi. Classy.

What I didn't like:

- the owners do not carry their real names.
- player rosters are difficult to manage.
- too much "loading" in between screens. You spend more time "waiting" for the game than you do playing sometimes. Make sure you have something else to do while playing this. It does help.
- the free agent signing was a little disappointing, and not as easy as it is with Madden. You can find the players you want with Madden easily. Here, it takes quite a bit of effort.
- the rating system for players is different than with Madden.

I'm going to keep playing, just because I am curious about how future years are handled. I'd wait a week or two when the price for used ones drops to half of the cost of new. The game isn't worth $40.00.

Man was I excited about this game! I love coaching and I actually love all the behind the scenes things that go on. Motivating players. Hiring players and coaches. Watching budgets. Organizing practices. Calling plays.

I was so excited, I very nearly just bought the game. I mean.... THIS IS EA SPORTS!! The same guys who've knocked it out of the park for years with MADDEN and TIGER WOODS. How, could it go wrong. Then, a friend of mine at Blockbuster warned me... "Rent it first. You may not like it."

THANK YOU FRIEND

Right off the bat... I don't really have anything good to say about this game. The only good thing I can say is that the IDEA OF THE GAME is amazing.

Here we go... MY GOD!! Office hours. You spend time in your office everyday... doing... whatever... or nothing... and every hour a new thing on your schedule comes up. Horribly boring. What makes matters worse... is, in your office time, you're only allowed to do 3 THINGS!! So, if you decide to change your Depth Chart around... you can only make 3 moves. WHAT!!

Then theres the load times!! Dear god... Everytime you move to a new thing on your schedule... it loads... I'm not sure what, because each and every function is horribly simplistic.

Then you have to meet with all the coaches who's contracts are up and decide whether or not you want to retain them. It gives you 2 options to say to them... just 2. Either a welcome back or a RUDE dismissal.

Then you meet with the owner once a week. You go in the room, wait for the load time, get there and he says... NOTHING!! "Well, we don't have anything to talk about this week. You're doing a good job coach."

Then you meet with the coaches. You may have some ideas of things you want to say to the coaches... like, "How are the receivers coming along? Are the rookies performing well? or is anybody disappointing?" But, no... the conversation possiblilities are horribly limited.

Then there's the designing your look function? Which, for some reason... comes AFTER YOU'VE BEEN COACHING FOR A FEW WEEKS???? Then, you can design what you look like. From EA SPORTS, in which they've had a game like TIGER WOODS where you can literaly make your golfer look surpringly JUST LIKE YOU. The design your look feature is an embarassment. I'm BALD! You can't make your guy bald. In fact, there are only about 5 faces you can choose from. 4 or 5 hairstyles.

Then there's the practices. You go to a practice with your players and you get to run 10 plays. No more. No less. 10 plays. THAT'S IT!! Then you gotta wait for it to load again so you can go back to your office and sit again. Then, in the practices, you watch somebody do something wrong. A bad tackle or not bump their receiver at the line of scrimmage... well... WHO WAS IT!! The graphics aren't good enough to tell which player it was... so, it gives you a grab bag of things you can yell to motivate or instruct your players... and you just have to guess who to direct it to.

So, I re-signed all my players. There were some I wasn't interested in retaining before the season. So, I was done with everything... except practices... so, rather than wait for it to load 50 times going to each OFFICE HOUR for absolutely nothing.... I went ahead and simulated past the office hours to the practices... AND THE GAME SIGNED THE PLAYERS I DIDN'T WANT TO SIGN!!!

Uggh... SCOUTING FREE AGENTS??? Another problem. So, why do I need to scout ISAAC 'Frickin' Bruce? The game won't tell you anything about him until you scout him. The guys been playing for years... I don't need to scout him. He's played in over 150 games.

Then, after tons of wasted minutes waiting for the game to load from task to task... monotonous office hours and coaches meetings where YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY SAY WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO SAY TO ANYBODY... including players, because it only gives you certain things you can say...

GAME DAY FINALLY ARRIVED!!

Yeah... horribly unrealistic. 5 minute quarters. Players marching up and down the field like defense didn't exist.

This game is awful from top to bottom and EA should be ashamed. I don't know why they would put out this lackluster piece of junk. They've been putting out a bunch of junk for awhile now... saving all their good stuff for the ps3. If they're not careful... they may not have a clientel left by the time PS3 finally does hit the shelves.

Avoid this game... it's an expensive coaster.

While playing Madden or my old favorite NFL2k games I usually spent as much or more time tinkering with my team than actually playing football. I was very excited about this game when i heard it was coming out. Boy am I disappointed.
The game is frustrating to say the least. It takes away most of the "freedom" that one gets from being a coach. I dont know what being an NFL Head Coach is like. But I promise you it is NOT like this game. Here are some examples of what really aggravated me

1. Ive been playing for 5 hours and have yet to even see a practice or a mini-camp. It has been long loading screens, boring menus, and confusing demands for 5 hours.

2. In that 5 hours I was forced to re-consider my COACH'S CLOTHING options about 7 times. WHY??? He is dressed fine. Let me skip this please?!?!?!?!

3. I did not have a D line coach. I tried to sign one and the game told me I couldnt. Yet the owner of the team was getting mad that I was not hiring anyone. The instructions and in-game tutorials are all-but useless.

4. The game forces you along a very boring and un-realistic path. Why force me to look at players I do not want? Why give me "office time" and allow me to do nothing but design plays and look at my depth chart? And why, if you want me to look at the depth chart, can I only shift two players around per day before you tell me I cant do anymore roster moves?????

5. If you want to sign a player or coach you cant until the game tells you you can. Even in the free-agency period, you can only look at three players a day. And if for some reason the game doesnt want you to talk to players or agents or whatever, YOU CANT. Even in "office time, which is supposed to be free time to do what you want.

6. You cannot look at player stats when signing them without having a scout look the player over first. Heck, anyone can look on the internet and find any players stats in the league. But this game takes all of the information away from you when trying to sign someone. You have to go into building your team blind.

7. Every time I try to do the most basic task the game tells me I cant do it, or I am in the wrong screen to perform the action. Yet the game doesnt try to help me understand how to do what I want to do.

8. The game is extremely structured. It only lets you do that it wants you to do at that time. Which takes all the freedom out of being the man IN CHARGE.

9. The game does not allow you to sim forward. Example: I had signed all the free agents I wanted to sign. Yet there were still 14 days of free agency left. I was forced to look at the free agents anyways, and forced to set thru the long loading screens instead of skipping the process all together.

Here is how the game SHOULD HAVE BEEN structured.

You should have a time schedule to play with. Lets say, 12 hours a day. You may delegate tasks to your underlings to make more time for yourself. You should be able to do what ever you want with your time, when ever you want to do it. You should be given a "to-do" list for the off season, and it should be UP TO YOU on how you go about doing the items on that list.

The interface should be easy to understand. Player stats should be freely available. It should be easier to hire coaches and sign players. You should not be limited on how many players you can talk to, or when you can talk to them. As long as it fits into the schedule set by the owner it should be possible.

Bottom line. The game need a serious overhaul next season. It has such potential. But not in its current form.

Head coach is a new game that is solely based around the life of a head coach. If you like strategy games and love football, this game will be for you. This game may not be for everyone though. It is basically the epitome of all behind-the-scenes tactics in football. This game is more about outsmarting everyone by building your team and becoming a successful coach in the NFL.


The game begins with you creating your coach so that it may look as you choose for him to look. The graphics for the coach are absolutely horrible. The next step is to interview for a team where you sit down with the owner of the team and he will ask you questions and your answers will determine the outcome of your interview where you will be offered positions by different teams. I only interviewed with one team and received offers from 5 NFL teams, including the one I interviewed with. HUH??? Ok, anyway, from there the team you sign with will invite you to your new office and offer to show you around. Once again, your answers will make the owner take a liking to you or not. If you give answers that people find to be good, you will see a plus sign appear over their head. The answers are actually pre-determined. You may get 3 answers to choose from or you may only get one, which only allows you to answer that way. Some of the answers are things you simply would not say to an owner who is paying your salary. I.E.-"I made this decision to better the team, not to please you!" Leaving the first answer your only option to choose from. The owner will tell you where your team stands as of last season and what is expected of you in the coming year. Do as he says...OR ELSE!!!

You immediately get familiar with your office and spend a lot of time on the computer. This is where the bulk of everything happens. Although, they do add folders, television, and phones to access. You can alter your playbook, fire coordinators or coaches, interview for new coaches or coordinators, you can promote coaches to coordinators, move coaching positions to other positions you feel they may do better with, make trades, build relationships with agents, etc.

You take care of practices, run drills, determine whether it will be contact or non-contact drills, call the plays during the games, motivate a specific group who may not be performing well, etc. This is almost like a SIMS game surrounded by the NFL. Things you say or do will determine where you stand in the organization.

Players stats, resigning players, drafting, etc, is quite a task in trying to become the best coach ever with the limited amount of information provided and in the difficulty setting trying to draft players and see their attributes and how to contact agents to make trades and things like that. A lot of this game is inconsistent with what it is trying to do. The correct players are not even on the right team. Terrell Owens is still on the Eagles??? They had plenty of time to update this so that it may reflect a true roster.

The load times are unreal. It takes forever to get from task to task. Point blank, the game is very redundant. You will need a lot of patience to play this. If you are fast paced madden style, this will not be a game for you. The only thing I truly enjoy doing in this game is coaching the actual games. EA makes it so difficult to really do anything else by limiting what you can do and cannot do during specific periods. Office hours should be a time where you can do whatever you like an unlimited amount of times. Trying to design a play or change plays and only getting two tries to do it each office hour is so unrealistic. The game consistently repeats itself over and over, especially during the offseason. The best part about this game is preparing your team for the coming week's game and actually coaching the game, but some of the things entangled with this process is overwhelmingly redundant and limited at the same time. You will spend more times waiting on load times than anything else. I would honestly rent this game and try it first. The $40 is not worth it. I only gave this game 4 stars because I enjoy the actual coaching aspect of it and for no other reason.

All in all, this is a decent game, but only for the coaching of the actual games and prepping of the team during the week of the game. Eveerything else feels like to much work. I honestly believe it was a ploy by EA to recover from the hit last year that ESPN gave them with the ESPN NFL game for only $19.99. I believe they are simply trying to regain the money they lost due to that. It is strategically placed....Head Coach end of June realease, College Football end of July release, Madden end of August release. I bought this game solely because its tougher to manage a team and make all the decisions to build a winning organization and continue that success to become the greatest of all time. But, if this is not the style of football you like and you just want to play the actual game of football, this may be a little toned down and less action packed for some of you. Hope this review helps!

After nearly 12 hours of game play I got my "first" team to training camp, before I noticed some problems. I saved often (that and the load screens took so much time) and backtracked with a few coordinator hires and did the draft twice. Finally, I realized that I could change my weekly schedule around (except for office time and meetings). This was a great feature for practices, especially more WR/DB drills to help out my rookie QB stats. Anyway back to my problem -the bugs. First bug-There seems to be a glitch with my 4th WR on the Depth chart. I used Miami and it was Wes Welker. Everytime I moved him to #5 or #3- the next office hour period he would go back to #4 and sometimes be both 3&4 or 4&5. I traded him and his replacement did the same thing. (Tried a new team, CD & PS2 and it continued to do this) A spread offense w/a terrible 2nd slot WR sucks.
Bug#2 is the "getting stuck" issue I have during practices. the players would have a little random movement between plays but the play call option would never come up. No button would work except "reset" or "power". Unfortunately this happens w/ 2 different CD's and PS2's.
And finally #3 bug, the worst! I'm about to play my 2nd regular season game. I saved it on Sat afternoon office hours. When it sims through the games for Sunday, getting to my late game all the Scores are 0-0 and it won't advance to my game. UGH!! Again I used different PS2's and CD's same thing. I haven't experience any trouble with my memory card. But since I was stuck, I deleted the career and started over with a new Memory card. The #4WR and getting stuck during practice was present on this save as well.
-Great Idea. Fairly good game- But if/when the next version comes out please be bug free!

I bought this game Sunday and I feel it is an excellent game but with one downfall, the load times. Too many and too long.

I love the intricate parts of the game that you have to take part in from hiring and firing coaches, scouting players, drafting players, running players through drills, and the games.

The draft is fun regardless of what you read. Yes your Scouting Director tells you who to draft, but like me, I go against him and draft who I want. And you can sim through all the other picks of other teams or take it slow and work the phones trading.

This game is not for the madden person who likes to play the game. Its for all of those out there who love the strategy of the games and the personnel department.

Like I said though, the amount of loading and the time to load are excessive.

Other than that this game is strategically fun and I will definetly hold on to it and play the heck out of it!

I've only had this game for a short while, but am buying a copy for my brother, as we're both serious football junkies. He's at the stage now where every game of Madden he plays is an 80-point blowout - time to move on.

I read through these reviews first, and I have just one thing to say: It's the attack of the ADD Generation!!!

If you can't sit through a 30 minute television show, this is NOT the game for you, however, if you are really passionate about football, and understand the intricacies of Assistant Coaches, Free Agency, and Salary Cap Management, then this could be very enjoyable.

I agree about the loading times, but that comes with any PS2 game. This is a strategy game, not Blitz 12.

I rented this game to see what it was like and have concluded that it is pretty much the worst game ever created! I'm sure this is a great simulation of what the life of an NFL coach is actually like, but come on! This makes coaching in the NFL seem like one of the lamest jobs in the world. I played for well over two hours and spent the majority of my time reading and trying to remember what I had read an hour ago. I felt like I was in school and had to study for a final or something.

I decided to try to "play" an actual game to see what that would be like and almost wanted to slam my head in the door! I know that there is no traditional gameplay but give me a break! Does anyone really want to sit there for the duration of say a 20 minute game calling plays and watching the computer run them and then trying to motivate your virtual guys to stop blowing it?

EA needs to seriously re-think this little gem of an idea. When a game feels like work instead of play there is a major problem. Maybe they could combine a simpler, watered down version of this game with Madden by just adding some new features to coach mode.

For shame EA, for shame!

This isn't a bad game but there are some gliches. The load times are long and it takes forever to do any team changing. The game isn't for married people with kids. I don't have as much time to play as I did when I was single and kidless. I have about an hour to play a day and this game takes much longer than that to get through a week. I sim some of the tasks but it bites me in the butt because I didn't get to do what I wanted; instead the computer does. Take away the long load times and let me do more than 2 changes at a time and this might be a great game.