I thought RL 1 was good minus the obvious bugs/errors mentioned here. The best part was the second phase play. No other rugby league or rugby union game has done this, at all really. It was great fun when a player was tackled but still had his hands free and you could offload the ball. This made for good, fun and varied sets. It wasn't side to side pass and score Rugby 2005 rubbish. The main things they have to work on is to...
* Provide forwards to shield the kicker. The kicker got tackled too easily.
* Fix the holding up in the dead ball
* The kicking for goal bug
* Forward running onto the ball from dummy half
* Floating, unrealistic forward passes
* sh*tty looking spear tackles
* Get rif of that repeating big tackles, it ruins the flow of the game
* Generic player models
* Better defensive controls
From the E3 video it looked as if players ran onto the ball which is a great start. I honestly don't think it needs an engine overhaul. They captured the sport really well, and it's the best ever first up attempt of a sports game I can recall. League and union are hard games to develop because they are free flowing and so many variations can happen quickly.
Rugby 2005 was a simplified game to help it sell in America. All you had to do was pass the ball to the backs, ruck, pass to the backs the opposite side...repeat. Score. There was no advantage by taking the ball up the middle. Passes to forwards after a ruck would result into going to the ground all the time. The player models, stadiums were really good. The animations were superb as well, such as the tackles and ankle taps. The special moves such as the sidestep, fend weren't that useful.
Anyway, after the awesome sales, HES will have a much bigger budget which should help sidhe into a better produced, polished game.
I am looking forward to 4 games this year and 3 of them funnily enough are sports games. Madden 2006, NHL 2006 and Rugby League 2. I can't wait
