AMN's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game's About
NFL Tour is an extreme football game that takes the excitement of any given Sunday and amps it up for a more fast paced, frenzied game.

What's Hot
The same team responsible historically for the important Madden franchise gets to kick up their heels and have some fun without having to worry about how statistically accurate their data is for average yards gained during a snow storm on a Thursday.

EA Tiburon stripped away complex control schemes in favor of a streamlined, easy-to-play game you can pick up and put down on a moments notice. All aspects that might traditionally scare would-be sports fans have changed, in some fashion, to aid in digestion of the game for beginners. Tour could just as easily be an arcade game with the offense oriented action.

Tour isn't only for beginners; there is plenty for football pros to get behind. The gameplay is reminiscent of Arena football on TV, so it offers a completely different experience than the simulation gameplay of a traditional football title. Games are faster, the hits are harder, and the plays are more sizzle and less of the steak for an instantly rewarding experience you can't find in a traditional football title.

Minigames, although few in number, add a great deal of variety to the standard gameplay modes in Tour. Smash and Dash is particularly fun when you throw a bunch of your friends in the same room to see who emerges victoriously.

The stripped down nature of Tour is its greatest strength. Everyone can enjoy the game and understand how it is played without a huge learning curve. Think of this as a "casual player friendly" sports title.



What's Not
The greatest strength of Tour is also its greatest weakness. From the beginning, you pick up that there isn't a whole lot of depth, an unfortunate side-effect of the stripped down gameplay. What you see is what you get. That can frustrate gamers looking for marathon sessions waiting for the Superbowl to start.

Along those same lines comes the question about how well the NLF license was used. In Tour's case, the game would have been unaffected if the NFL teams would have been omitted completely. It is nice to see familiar star quality names in the game but at the end of the day, it doesn't feel like they matter that much more than a no-name player on third string, gameplay wise.

The game announcer for Tour should have been cut. The first few times he breaks the fourth wall you might get a half-hearted laugh but the continual comments about how you hear the same calls grows irritatingly ironic. Turn the commentary off.

The PS3 version of Tour suffers from being the port. The framerate isn't as solid and the game doesn't look as slick. The SIXAXIS controls for shaking a guy off is neat in concept but fails to enhance the gameplay experience.

Final Word
NLF Tour keeps its feet grounded in believability while taking a more arcade style approach. To boil it down, Tour is a happy medium between Madden and NLF Blitz. The gameplay is unapologetically simple and straightforward, with a clear focus on accessibility. For that, Tour succeeds with the best of the extreme arcade football games. While the depth of title can be called into question (there could have been a little more) this could signal for the start of a new type of sports game that hearkens back to a time where Tecmo Bowl ruled the roost.