The game just doesn't play well. There's no structure to it at all, I redownloaded it before and deleted it again after an hour. The game is broken because when trying to make metres you'll see a gap and almost get through it but a defender will magically float towards you. The passing is just off, defending is boring and unrealistic when you see Johnathan Thurston smash through players like JWH and Cordner.
I can't say I've experienced either of these to be honest. From my experience of it passing works just fine and is better than it was in terms of targeting players than most other footy games I've played with the possible exception of Rugby '08, which utilised some of EA's more advanced tech and had the best offloads system I've come across.
Agree with you about small guys hammering big guys, but that's also something that has been almost universal in these games, and was definitely worse under Sidhe.
Jungle ball is a reference to the way Warriors play footy, it's a semi-racist term in a way. All games may have had this but at least in RLL3 it is the only way to make metres, you play one out footy and you'll end up making 15m in the whole set.
Using dummy half runs and hit ups I generally make between 30-50 meters in a lot of sets after about the 20 minute mark (game time - I play 20 min matches). But early in the game they don't let you make many metres.
Career mode is unrealistic, if you have the halves set on anything above 10 minutes you start seeing a scores of 64-32 and wingers get the Dally M more often then not. Also when buying players you seem to have an endless amount of Salary Cap you can offer about 15 different guys $500k and you'll get them all. Also by making you have to go into your lineup before every game is annoying. You'll accidentally simulate your lineup selection and you'll have random players instead of the ones you want. Not to mention who they choose is geniused, I had Stapleton, Meehan and a randomly generated player in my side instead of Jennings, Moa and Cordner. The career mode may not be broken but it's so poorly done with design choices that are so questionable it boggles the mind as to why they were implemented in the game.
Fair enough. My experience hasn't been like that and I play longer than 10 mins, but I do generally like to try play it like real footy and use hit-ups more and grind my way into games before I start spreading it.
The player acquisition thing is a pretty silly screw-up and I don't know how they missed it, but it didn't really ruin my experience as you can just offer them something in their range. It's not terribly realistic, but I've yet to play a League or Union game with anything half-way comprehensive (Rugby '08 had a serviceable career mode, but it wasn't anything close to realistic).
I tend to auto generate my sides a fair bit too, but I haven't had the same issues you had for whatever reason; the side tends to be reasonably accurate in my experience.
Anyway though, I think we can probably say we disagree on this one.
I reckon it's a solid game. It has it's issues and it's not brilliant, but it's solid and I have gotten my fair share of fun out of it.
In an ideal world the NRL would sign some contract with EA and get them to have their Madden team produce an awesome NRL game for $20 million and the NRL could just write it off as part of their advertising bill. It would be a heck of a smart way to advertise the sport in my view, but no one important seems to agree, so for now we're gonna have to just deal with the fact our sports games will all be pretty low budget until our population swells to about 10 times its current size.
