Best AFL Game ever made but it still has a lot to improve on.
-Presentation is very good.
-Commentary is pretty good, though there are still old-school style funnies.
- Multiplayer is quite fun
Cons: - Difficulty is extremely high and somewhat frustrating early on. You'll need a high tolerance of frustration.
- The game really has a short single player replay value.
- some bugs. I've had the game freeze on me a few times, and commentary seems to disappear every so often.
To start off, you'll either go into an exhibition or practice. Either way your first run at this game will see the opposition barrage you with goal after goal before you go back to the manual to see what buttons do what again.
I recommend playing an exhibition with 2 controllers, one for each team, so that you can practice playing with a full side without having the computer hounding you.
The Ruck contest is difficult to work out at first but it's actually not a bad idea. Your timing can determine if your guy goes up at the right time and direction can determine who you tap the ball too. So mastering the ruck can make winning a whole lot easier, as tapping it to a bloke who is free will give you time to take a kick or run for the goals.
The tackling is quite impressive and represents the true speed of AFL right now and while it can be annoying to start off with, it will force you to use the handball to quickly dispose of the ball or make you think about your kicks more carefully to retain possession. Sometimes you'll give away a free kick for a "high tackle" but this seems to be random.
The marking is probably the hardest part of AFL live. Even on the lowest difficulty, the computer opponent will never drop a mark, which makes me think they really stuffed up with the programming. In the real AFL even the best players drop easy marks here and there, and yet the Gold Coast will be able to pass the ball around like they're supermen. This is the most frustrating thing about AFL live in the early stages. You can spoil but you will need to either rely on the AI to do it for you, or switch control to the man about to spoil, and do it manually. The manual option is good as long as you get the timing right.
Goal Scoring is done rather well. Pressing X (on xbox) will aim for the goals and depends on how your players goal scoring ability is. If you take a mark within scoring range a small set of goals icon will appear. Pressing X will take you to a sort of goal scoring mode where you'll get info on the wind and what leg you kick with. So you can be like Paul Salmon and take all day. It's not very realistic since a lot of players kick very straight in real life but the mechanics are sort of like a minigame so that you can only blame yourself if you miss, not the game. If you are a right footer, you'll have to angle the kick to the right, so that it swings back in and vice-versa for a left-footer. The wind may move the ball a bit but it doesn't really compare to how much you need to angle the ball for your kicking foot. A shot from straight infront will require you to turn the player a good 20 degrees in order to get a goal safely.
You can make your own players in AFL Live and your own team. This is an option that will probably get improved upon next year as it's a little disappointing that you only have about 5 guernseys to pick from and only a few collection of colours. But it's still fun listening to Dennis Commetti saying all the nicknames.
My biggest gripe of AFL live comes back to the marking. Kicking in from a behind is extremely difficult mainly because you can't really see who you are kicking too. Most of the time the computer will spoil your mark or mark it themselves. This is where the game needs to have better tactics implemented, gone are the days of when AFL was simply a long kick to a contest and hope the biggest guy marks it, though some might say Richmond still play by those rules. . . So playing with friends can actually take the frustration away and also create better tactics - get him to run into free space for an easy mark, for example.
So it's fun but still somewhat annoying. Promising signs though.