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Wales Online
Sport
Ben James

Rugby 22 review: Rugby's best video game in 15 years is let down by frustrating off-field flaws

It has long been a bone of contention that rugby union hasn't had a decent video game in a long, long time.

For many, Jonah Lomu Rugby, released in 1997, remains the pinnacle - a time capsule filled with Bill McLaren's quips that may never be topped.

For some, EA Sports' efforts - culminating with Rugby 08 - is the finest virtual form of rugby we have seen. Many dedicated fans still mod the title with updated squads, kits and stadiums some 15 years after its release. That was 2007.

It has been a long wait for anything resembling a quality game since then. In that time, rugby league and cricket have had their fair share of decent games made by independent publishers.

Rugby union may have seen a few titles made by smaller publishers since the likes of Codemasters and EA Sports lost interest, but nothing really jumps out as a good game.

Rugby World Cup 2011 was a scaled-down port of Rugby 08's engine, only with fewer features.

Rugby 15 and Rugby World Cup 2015 were bare-bone titles with forgettable game-play and even less in the way of replay-ability.

The Rugby Challenge series was just a bizarre run of games, starting out with promise before ending up with recycled, bug-laden games as the copy-and-pasted game engine bounced around developers and publishers.

The one positive from them, though, is the career mode - archaic in terms of modern sports games, but at least resembling a traditional career mode - and the ability to edit and create players.

We'll circle back to them later.

Which brings us onto Rugby 22, the third in the series of games developed by EKO Software and published by Nacon and BigBen Interactive.

The first, Rugby 18, was a bit of a mess. Rugby 20 was a more refined title, with plenty of promise.

Does Rugby 22 build on that promise? Well, yes and no.

Gameplay-wise, this game is probably the closest any title has come to capturing modern rugby, and is certainly the best on-field game since Rugby 08.

While it's not perfect, and the game can either reward you or the computer for essentially breaking it with long, looping miss-passes from rucks, it does flow better than previous iterations.

The movement of the players feels fluid more often than not, and there are moments which truly suck you in.

In one match as Cardiff, hitting new Wales call-up James Ratti on a short-ball to make a clean break up the middle felt exactly how a mobile forward marching away should feel.

While there are less licensed teams compared to Rugby 20, you can still play as the Welsh sides in the URC (Rugby 22)

So, too, some of the interplay in the wider channels when playing as France, Fiji or any other free-wheeling team. Passing feels crisper and cleaner, but it's also more likely to punish you for forcing things.

Unlike Rugby 20, you cannot simply take contact and throw a 20-metre pass out like it's nothing.

As a result, many of the tries feel earned as you have to properly work through the phases to score. The implementation of tactics and pods - advertised as new, but largely available in Rugby 20 - only help that.

There is something quite rewarding about setting up a forward pod before pulling the ball back to the fly-half behind to move it wide. Playing as Wales, for instance, it is a fun way to get the ball out to your strike-runners which feels natural rather than just spamming mispasses all the time.

When you do cross the whitewash, goal-kicking, which was bizarrely hard in the previous game, has been made a little more forgiving now.

But there are flaws, too, of course. Kicking still feels a little redundant - with up-and-unders virtually impossible to regather despite a new catching feature.

Defending ultimately feels a bit of a chore at times, with there seeming to be less control and more luck involved than, say, Rugby 08.

Graphically, there are moments when the game looks decent. However, there are times when it looks a bit FIFA 2002 with some of the lighting creating creepy-looking faces projecting just a bit too much emotion. Of course, graphics aren't overly important and they don't exactly ruin the immersion.

The graphics can look a little stilted at times, particularly in harsh lighting (Rugby 22)

However, on the whole, there is probably more to like about Rugby 22 than not. It's not perfect, but if you want to play rugby in a style befitting Fiji, Exeter or Harlequins, you're more than capable of it.

Not that you'd see the last two teams in the game. The license of the Gallagher Premiership is lacking and while the French leagues and the United Rugby Championship are there, it is a huge blow for a game which ultimately has less official teams than its previous release.

Where you truly feel the effect of this is in the game's "career mode", which I'm loathed to call a career mode.

Essentially, it's a FIFA-style Ultimate Team card game, where a relentless grind of matches earns you points to buy Panini-style packs, containing cards of random players to improve your custom team.

But with the lack of a Premiership license, many of the players are randomly-generated and unlicensed, meaning your team could easily be filled with Joe Bloggs multiplied rather than Antoine Dupont or Louis Rees-Zammit.

With that being the main draw of Rugby 22, it saps the longevity out of the game seriously. There's a 'league' mode but it's a single season thing. You can fulfil your fantasy of winning the URC with the Dragons, but once you're done, you're done. There's no second season, no recruitment or anything like that.

That's the problem with the game. You can't push it much beyond the boundaries off the pitch.

It's a good time to come back to the two positives from the Rugby Challenge series: career mode and player creation/editing. How Rugby 22 desperately needs these two features.

The movement of the players, while not always the case, feels fluid more often than not. (Rugby 22)

The career mode part speaks for itself. If Nacon and Big Ben truly want to make this into a series of games which can grow, the first thing they need to ditch is the card-based career mode in favour of one with recruitment based on choice rather than luck. That cannot be stressed enough.

The other thing is the ability to edit teams and players. Right now, you can't move players from one team to another, nor can you edit stats or create new players.

The squads in this game aren't perfect, nor are the ratings. Sam Parry boasts the same 87 rating as Alun Wyn Jones, while some of the regions are missing big names entirely.

Leigh Halfpenny may be injured, but it would still be nice to feature him in the Scarlets squad somewhere. Being able to move players around, edit abilities and create new players wouldn't only solve oversights by the developers, but breathe much-needed life into a game that can grow stale quickly.

That's largely the issue with Rugby 22. It doesn't take long to question why you should play it.

For all the promise on the pitch, that's an issue the developers will need to rectify if there is to be a fourth title in the series.

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