After many hours (literally) of preparation it will finally be time for the opening kickoff of the season. The games are the most enjoyable aspect of NFL Head Coach as they are a chance for you to put your play-calling abilities to the test. The playbook is laid-out nicely and grouped by down and yardage, so it’s easy to get to the play that you want to call. Your offensive or defensive coordinator will always suggest a play for you just in case you can’t decide or are distracted by another activity like yelling at your players or instructing your QB to take the sack rather than throw the ball away. Just like in the real world the game will keep going whether or not you’re paying attention to the action on the field. You’ll also be able to call audibles from the sidelines as well as the standard actions such as calling timeouts and challenging calls.

The action on the field takes place in 3D as if you were watching other people play Madden NFL. The player models don’t look as good as they do in Madden NFL, but that’s to be expected given that the action is relegated to a smaller portion of the screen. The game simulation is pretty good for the most part, but it’s not without a few quirks. For example, the interception frequency is way too high and for some reason the game seems to have trouble executing screen passes.

That’s pretty much the NFL Head Coach experience. You drive your team through the season and hopefully into the playoffs and then start the whole process over again in the spring. Your ability to produce a winner will be watched closely by the game just as if you were a real coach, and you’ll receive feedback on your performance via a few ratings factors such as the owner’s confidence level in your skills and your ranking among the current coaches and all-time coaching greats.

NFL Head Coach does support online play and there is definitely some enjoyment to be had here. If you’ve played Madden NFL online before then you’ve probably run into your share of punks who try to run the same play exploits over and over again to the point where they take the fun out of the game. With NFL Head Coach the games are more of a cerebral experience. You’ll still have problems leading the Texans to a lot of online victories, but things are pretty balanced when the players use evenly matched teams. Also, the game won’t allow you to take the teams that you build in career mode online. This is a missed opportunity as it would certainly have been interesting if players could put their GM skills to the test against those of other players.

NFL Head Coach is not a bad game, but its emphasis on micromanagement will seem tedious to all except the biggest control freak sim fans. The PC version also suffers from the fact that it is a console port and the entire interface was designed to be run with a gamepad. The interface is at once annoying and baffling. Scroll bars are just there for show; you can’t use the mouse to move the scroll bar and the mouse wheel doesn’t do anything. There are some long lists in the game and it can be tedious to use the arrow keys alone to scroll through them. The baffling part of the interface comes from the key-mapping. The ‘[‘ key is used for backspace and ‘Backspace’ is used to navigate up a menu level. Got that?

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 68%.  NFL Head Coach brings football sims into the 21st Century, but it still won’t appeal to many people beyond hardcore sports sims fans.

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