broken, recycled old features + broken new features = NCAA 10.
Gameplay (on the field) - 5/10: If you want to qualify for online leaderboards (don't bother; they are spammed with ridiculous cheese stats like 30k career yards rushing and 300 sacks), you have to play with the default AI, which is horrible. Runs get stopped in the backfield and blocking is non-existent even with a small amount of defenders "in the box". There may be a way to make the gameplay somewhat realistic, but it will be on AI settings significantly offset from the defaults.
In Road to Glory, you can forget about your coach catering to his new 5-star blue chipper, even if you play on some team like Idaho or Eastern Michigan. It's not going to happen. You'll find that if you are a rusher, your coach calls mostly pass players, and some draw plays, and if you are a receiver, there are a lot of run plays. This mode is more like the Road to Insanity, as the play calling will drive one nuts. QB is about the only bearable offensive position, with the option to audible out of stupid play calls.
Simulation - 3/10: Since I play only about 20-25% of the games in any given season, I need the simulation to be accurate. This game is not. For example, let's look at passing accuracy. In 2009, 44 of the top 100 passers were over 60% completion, and 99 out of 100 were over 50%. In this game, it seems over half of the passers complete less than half of their passes. Some starting QBs with pretty high accuracy ratings even make it into the 30s. It's in the game? Not when it comes to completion percentage. Other things that bothered me were the yards per carry for running backs. Not many RBs average over 5 yards a carry in this game, even though it's very common in college. Over 60 players did so in 2009, while over 20 averaged over 6 a carry. Stuff like this really screws up a gameplan. Being a pass-heavy team like Hawaii and having 37% completion from your 80 OVR QB is just not going to cut it.
They really need to add simulation sliders to this game. This game is really behind on that. The 2K football games had this over 5 years ago. EA Sports basketball games had them back then as well. Why add AI sliders for played games, and no ability to adjust the simulation tendencies to match your play?
Customization - 8/10:
The custom conference ability is a welcome addition, as well as the "new" Team Builder option. The only problem with Team Builder is that you *always* have to be online to "authorize" team logos. Really, what's the point of this? Once you have downloaded the team, you should be able to use it locally on your own system. I put a lot of work into my logos for my teams, and since I mostly play offline, they ended up being replaced by the circular EA Sports logo when not connected to XBox Live. They dropped the ball on this. Additionally, a way to make teams in the game without having to go online would be nice. The only real benefit of doing so online is to download other people's teams and to import logos from your computer's hard drive.
Graphics - 5/10:
The player models look off, and the animations are horrendous. Choppy running motions and ridiculous animation physics really hurt this game. Player models seem to have skinny arms and fat torsos more often than not (especially linemen). The legs are weird too. I thought they had a pretty good model in 2004. They should have just added more polygons to that one. The re-worked next-gen models have looked silly from the beginning. The old ones weren't broken; they just needed some updating for the newer systems.
Sound - 7/10:
Sound's okay, I guess. I'm no expert in game sound. I just know that the repeated fight songs playing over and over again in the main and dynasty menus gets old fast. Also what's up with not having commentary in Road to Glory? That PA guy is all you hear even when you are playing a National Championship game.
Overall - 6/10:
If I didn't like the custom conference ability and Team Builder options so much, this game would be more like a 4 or 5. It's just that bad and uninspired. Only the most hardcore EA Sports fanboy would back this excuse of a yearly installment. EA Sports used to create some pretty true-to-life sports titles, and still do when studios not named Tiburon are involved. It seems they took a detour from the right direction in 2005 and now the franchise has taken a course way down south from where it should be. You'd think that at least the graphics would be better with next gen processing, but not really. They look worse as well.