I suppose what bothers me the most about NFL Head Coach is that you can't do much seat-of-your-pants management, just about everything needs to be a task and planned in advance. Expect to see a lot of messages that say you can't do X during this time. Why not? Shouldn't I be able to call another coach just about anytime I want? Also during your office hours you are only allowed to complete a few tasks and some of the tasks seem to be very simple yet you are only allowed to do a couple of them. For example, I wanted to move around my roster a bit and move a few second stringers to first string...this takes two days to do because apparently it takes too much time to do more than two roster moves in a day! What ever happened to the legendary stories of coaches that stayed at work all night?!? You also adjust your plays during these office hours, check e-mail, read news, etc. And while the majority of the game takes place in your office it's a little odd that you don't get to customize it.

NFL Head Coach leads me to believe that there is much more luck involved to being a head coach than I ever thought. Here's what I mean. During the practices you can focus on an individual player to get his stats up for game day. The thing is sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't...for the same player! And during practices you can, through a series of dialogs, coach up a group of players using either aggressive or passive speeches. But the results do not really seem to follow any pattern and there does not seem to be a way to tell what path will work best. You're just rolling the die and hoping for the best. I did like that the game's AI looked like it took my suggestions. For example, I wasn't real happy with the QB launching the ball whenever pressure would show up. So I told him to hold it a bit longer and even take a few more sacks. Well he certainly listened as he was sacked on the next 3 plays. During these practices you have the opportunity to have the AI handle the practices...don't do it! If you skip the manual parts of a practice and let the game sim it for you there will be a lot more injuries on your team. Not sure why this happens, but it does.

What I figured would be the most enjoyable part of the game, coaching during an actual game, did turn out to be the best part...but that's not saying much. One irritating part is that I couldn't tell my team to pay more attention to a specific player. Let's just say I may want to double team Marvin Harrison all day...not going to happen. On the brighter side, the action on the field looks nice but most of the game takes place through many dialog trees and other boring looking interfaces.

So I was interested to find out if my enjoyment for football overcame my disinterest in strategic games. Well in my case the micromanagement aspect was just too much for me to overcome but for those that thought the franchise modes in the Madden games were the best part of those games then you may want to look
 

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 71%. So I was interested to find out if my enjoyment for football overcame my disinterest in strategic games. Well in my case the micromanagement aspect was just too much for me to overcome but for those that thought the franchise modes in the Madden games were the best part of those games then you may want to look elsewhere.

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