On the court the game delivers a mix of good and bad. It does a great job of capturing the collegiate atmosphere, be it in a large arena that’s home to a school with a rabid fan base or in the cozy confines of a small college gym with a smattering of indifferent fans. The crowd’s reactions follow the flow of the game, and it’s fun to pump up the home crowd with a breakaway dunk or silence the opposition’s arena with a back-breaking three. The crowd and the flow of the game will have an effect on your players’ composure which will either boost or lower the players’ ratings depending on whether or not things are going well on the court. As your team makes good plays you’ll earn ticks on a boost meter that can be used with the Left Bumper to make the selected player play to the crowd or pump up his teammates, or to taunt the opposition. If you fill the meter completely you can unleash an Impact Moment and do things like whip up the crowd or dance with the mascot. A fully boosted or down team does appear to benefit or suffer slightly from their state, but the boost system seems to feed the game’s atmosphere more than it does the gameplay itself.

The game’s controls work well – you have a pass button and separate buttons for outside shots and lay-ups/dunks. The right stick is used for free throws by pulling the stick backwards to start the shot motion and then smoothly moving it forward to follow through on the shot. It’s a good method for controlling free throws and feels more natural than the myriad of timing mini games that have served for free throws in basketball games in the past. The right stick is also used on offense to select a special dribble move to get past a defender. For the most part it works well although if you use it too close to the sidelines you’ll be locked into the dribble animation sequence and helpless to stop your man from dribbling his way a few feet out of bounds. On defense the right stick is used to guard an opposing player closely and moving the stick in different directions allows you put your hands up or guard against a pass to the side. Using the right stick on defense is vital if you want to win because if you leave the defense to its own devices you’ll find that your AI teammates don’t play defense very well and have an annoying habit of opening up lanes to the basket that are wide enough to drive a semi through. You’ll need to control your fastest player and keep in the face of the man with the ball or constantly switch players as the ball moves around. Your team plays a bit smarter on offense, but does a lot better if you can work the ball in for a shot quickly. If you have to pull up and set your offense you’ll have a difficult time working the ball inside because your team will not make the best effort at getting open inside. There are also some flat out gaffs in the AI such as players posting up and calling for the ball while the ball is nowhere near them on the other side of the key.

The scattershot AI is not the only in-game annoyance. The frequency of fouls is far too high, even if you adjust the game’s slider for foul frequency as low as possible. The end game is nearly unbearable when you’re ahead because there is no way to avoid being fouled. When the opposition goes into intentional foul mode, the player taking the inbound pass immediately goes into a ball-cradling animation that can’t be aborted and the opposition moves in to foul before you can do anything. I’d love it if just once I could kill the clock off to end the game by moving the ball around the court. Also the need to fill the screen with the NCAA logo or other transitional screen at every single stoppage of play stretches the real-world time needed to complete a game in a most annoying manner.

NCAA March Madness 07 looks great, has a wonderful collegiate atmosphere, and at its heart has the potential to be a great game. With some work it could truly be a great game, but the 07 version is not Final Four material yet.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 71%. NCAA March Madness 07 is at least another year away from a run at the championship.

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