Arena Football (PlayStation 2)

Football fans who only know NFL-style play, with 100-yard fields and a serious ground-game strategy, may initially find ARENA FOOTBALL a bit quirky. To keep the games quick and high-scoring, most of the offensive work revolves around passing, and there are a few new rules regarding defense and blitzing.

Players with some football familiarity should quickly master the basic mechanics of selecting plays and then controlling the timing of the snap, pass, and maybe a couple of evasive running moves. They'll be racking up points in no time. It's not hard for one team to pile on eight touchdowns in a 20-minute game. And the defense can execute some flashy and satisfying tackles -- smashing ball carriers over the sideline boards, for example -- to match the offensive energy.

Arena Football rushes players like a blitzing linebacker, and on a superficial level it does a good job of capturing the in-your-face attitude and intensity of the real game. Before long, though, the mediocre presentation and shallow play end up hobbling the game. The game provides a variety of fine-tuned control features, like switching control to the receiver as a pass is in the air, but making tweaks in plays while they're underway frequently throws off the timing and ruins the play. As a result, many of the more-complicated features are never very useful.

Other problems: The online community for Arena Football is frequently small, and players may not have many opponents to choose from. The game's characters look blocky, arenas feel sterile, the crowd is poorly defined, and the game lacks much voice-over audio.