Ultimate Pro Football GM

Really great in concept but a few tweaks are needed.

The game itself is great in concept and is still a ton of fun, but some aspects should be addressed. For one, the trade balancing needs to be reworked. I have the premium version of the game, so I can see the values each player on my team has, and it often does not seem fair. I understand that trading should be harder for the person initiating the trade, but it seems too hard. For example, in one of my save files I had a quarterback who was 25 years old, had an overall rating of 89, and five-star potential. Despite this, he was only valued at around 11,000 and also did not fit my offensive scheme. Meanwhile, a different quarterback on one of the AI teams was 22 years old, had an overall rating of 82, and three-star potential, yet had a trade value of 18,573. On top of that, it is nearly impossible to trade for any player with an overall of 90 or higher. In addition, any player you trade to an AI team suddenly has a trade value at least five times higher than when they were on your team. I understand that it should be harder to trade back for a player, but an increase of that magnitude is excessive. One last issue with trading is the draft: when a new season starts, a top-10 rated team often ends up with a top-five draft pick while keeping most, if not all, of its highly rated roster. I’m not saying this should never happen, but the frequency feels unbalanced and needs to be tweaked. As for gameplay, the overall experience is mostly fair, albeit with a few flaws. In the 2D engine, quarterbacks are glitched because they cannot fumble. This can be abused to make the game incredibly easy, as repeatedly running QB runs or option plays with a quarterback rated 90 or higher is almost guaranteed to succeed—even when the game indicates the opposing team is aware of the play—because the quarterback cannot fumble. The 2D engine also has issues with certain plays. Some medium and long passing plays seem to work about 90% of the time regardless of scheme or offensive style, while other plays almost never work. Tweaking the 2D engine to make passing plays more consistent across the board would be a major improvement. If these issues were addressed, this game would truly deserve a five-star rating.

Frustratingly addictive

This game makes it hard to have a decent team. Some things that should be improved: There seems to never be decent coaches available to hire. Same with Free Agents. After the FA period there is garbage available to sign. The defenders always seem to speed up when going after a pass. Other teams aren’t rated lower than 90 it seems. That said I love a challenging game because it is hard and I want to win! I do like it, just needs some minor tweeks I think.