The graphics in
NFL Street are excellent and provide the right level of pseudo-realism to match the game play. Players are a bit out of proportion but it matches the feel of the game very well. You also have the option to customize the appearance of your player right down to the tattoo's on their arms. I guess I would question the need to play dress up with my football team but that's just me. An option to sync all of the players on your team up to the same gear setup would have been nice but that's just my anal-retentive side showing.
Football isn't much of a game without a place to play and the 8 stadiums (XX Verify XX) are very well done. You play on everything from a sandy beach to the top of a building. Each stadium usually has a few items that you can interact with (there are barrels in the warehouse stadium and gulls and beach balls on the beach field.
The game animations are tight. I never had the game drop any frames even when there was a lot of action on screen. The player movement is fluid and the developers did a great job with the various style moves. The animations are perfect. They even did a great job with the offensive and defensive line animations (I loved the hop move where your player pushes the other player down and hops over them to go after the QB).
I did have a few small problems with the graphics. The first is that at times it was hard to figure out where the ball was (especially in some of the scrums around a fumble). While this is realistic, it would have been nice to have a circle or something around the ball to make it a little easier to find when it was on the ground. The second is that the game lowers the level of detail on the players when you zoom the camera all the way back. It's small and petty but it annoyed me to no end since it seemed unnecessary (there's no movement since you can only zoom back pre-snap). My final gripe is that when you use your GameBreaker the screen darkens a bit (like the sky darkening for a thunderstorm). This works great for the daylight stadiums but it makes things a bit difficult to see when you are playing in one of the night stadiums.
Whether you like the music or not in
NFL Street largely depends on what kind of music you like. If you like rap music, then you'll probably dig the majority of the menu music in the game (which also feature some songs exclusive to the game as well as a few decent rock tunes). The game allows you to de-select, which tunes are played in the menus and you can use music that you've copied over to your Xbox.
The in game sounds are solid. There are good visceral crunches and hitting noises in the game and the constant trash talk doesn't get old right away (but it does get old eventually, you can only hear "I've got internet stocks in better shape than you" so many times). The trash talk in the game is a nice touch and further enhances the street football concept of the game. For the most part, it's also situation specific (recognizing Gamebreakers, down and distance, previous plays, and game winning drives) but there were times it was a bit out of place (I shouldn't hear comments on my inability to run the ball after running it down the throat of the team on the last play). The "chatter" also breaks down the fourth wall a bit ("It's not me it's the guy controlling me" or "You know there's a turbo button"). The only negative with the chatter is that the game will occasionally play two or more sequences at the same time and that all of the dialog sounds like it comes from three, maybe four different people. I left it on because every time I was about to turn it off I would hear a new comment that I got a chuckle out of. It would be cool to get some banter going back and forth between the players during a game but that's something for the next version.
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