The NFL Street series is all about over-the-top, trash-talking bouts of seven on seven tackle football. In street football it’s not just about the winning, but also looking good and humiliating your opponent in the process. The series has done well enough to reach its third iteration, but should it have stopped at two?

NFL Street 3 takes to the streets firmly focused on the new centerpiece Respect the Street mode. You’ll need to take your team of creampuffs and fight your way to the top by taking on teams in various cities and earning the right to eventually play against NFL teams. Winning games earns you respect which lets you buy new gear, unlock new plays, and even to add some pro players to your roster. Starting out can be difficult, even more so if you’ve never played an NFL Street game before, because your starting team will be on the short end of the stick when it comes to player attributes. Once you do eventually make your way through the first several games, you’ll unlock training challenges that will finally allow you to start improving your players’ stats and make your team more competitive.

Now that's an extreme move.

The games in NFL Street 3 take on several different forms beyond your standard “be the first to score X points” gameplay. Timed games have the added time pressure of forcing you to score within a minute or turn the ball over. Elimination removes a play from your playbook if you fail to gain yardage with that play, with the loser being the player who runs out of plays first. Banked games save gamebreaker points earned by both teams into a “banked” account with the next player to score earning all the points in the bank. Games are played to a set number of points.

If you’re new to NFL Street you may be wondering what gamebreaker points are in the first place. As I mentioned earlier, winning in style is important in the game. You can use the left shoulder button in conjunction with other keys to taunt the opposition or pull off extreme moves. You can toss the ball downfield for a long touchdown, but to really rack up the gamebreaker points you can bounce the pass off of a wall, have the receiver lateral the ball, and then high step your way into the endzone. As you earn these points you’ll fill a meter that once full awards you with a gamebreaker. These can be unleashed while on offense or on defense to give you a powerful boost and even send a shockwave around your ball carrier to knock down nearby opponents. In prior NFL Street games unleashing a gamebreaker pretty much meant a guaranteed touchdown, but in this game it just gives you the boost and then leaves it up to you to make the most of it. This system works a lot better as far as I’m concerned. If an opponent uses a gamebreaker I’d rather have the chance to do something about it then be forced to watch a cutscene of my opponent scoring. While playing NFL Street 3 I’ve also noticed that the computer does not use its gamebreakers nearly as much as it did in prior games. I’m not sure why it now likes to horde them but apparently it does.

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