Rugby League Live 2

For a long time the Rugby League games haven't even played in the same division as the other sports games on the market. Hell, with Rugby League Live they weren't even playing in an organised capacity at all. It comes as a bit of a shock to see Rugby League Live 2 actually playing with the big boys then.

I say it's playing, but it's in much the same way that the Gold Coast Suns or Greater Western Sydney have both stepped into the Wooden Spoon position in their inaugural debuts. It's still not good - but at least it's trying, dammit.

Almost every complaint I had about the first game has been fixed - and they left the one area they excelled in alone. Passing is still assigned to your LB and RB buttons, and you can perform a cut-out pass by holding either button and pressing the B, Y, or X button corresponding with a player. You can now perform a flat cut-out pass by double tapping those buttons, but they almost always result in an interception, and I leave them the hell alone as a result.

Elsewhere they've made significant improvements. The timing on the animations has been tightened significantly, which means you no longer see Dragon Ball Z style warping tackles - a marked improvement. Playing the ball has a bit of pace to it and scrums stay locked in a little after the ball feeds out the back so you don't have the six biggest blokes on the field all a half-metre away from you all milling about doing nothing.

The controls have actually had some thought put into them now. Sprinting is assigned to its very own button - the R trigger - which means that on offence you can sprint and stiff-arm at the same time and on defence you can make a last minute diving tackle without goofing around with the buttons.

Tackles are improved as well - gone is the Head High button of the previous game. You have an arm-pinning tackle assigned to your B button, a low tackle on your A button and a last ditch dive on Y. A and B are your main two attacks here, and each has an advantage. The low tackle is safer option - they're harder to evade - but if you don't get a second tackler in it leaves your opponent free to offload the ball. The arm-pin won't let anyone offload, but it's a bit easy to dodge or stiff-arm through.

Another interesting addition is the ability to hold down players during tackles - if you hold B while the player is on the ground you can give your team a chance to get onside. I think it's a really great idea, and it certainly adds a layer of strategy to the game (a thin one, but it's there), but I feel like the referee sometimes gives you too long to lie on top of your opponent. Not a gamebreaker, but a bit of an inconsistency.

The stiff arm and the dodge are a bit hit and miss. Let's just savour that sentence for an hour or two.

Anyway, one of my chief complaints about RLL was the lack of a proper league system - I can happily tell you that RLL2 brings you the ability to play through a career managing your favourite teams - and that includes everyone from club side through to rep teams like the Indigenous All Stars, the Kangaroos and the mighty Maroons. It's a surprisingly robust management system reminiscent in ways of Sidhe's effort in Rugby League 3, and while it doesn't offer anywhere near as much depth as say FIFA or the NBA 2K series, it's still an okay way to get some game time in when your friends won't join you.

Online the game is... rough. There's a fair bit of lag which resulted in me getting more than my fair share of held tackle penalties, and it's amazing to see that players have already worked out how to exploit the AI at kick-offs to get the ball back with alarming regularity. When you work out how this trick works (it's pretty simple) it's something you can exploit in the single player game as well.



The game has some roughness in other areas as well. It's not very pretty - you can definitely tell who is who, but when the game is in motion it can get a bit tough to know who you're passing to. I'm not hard-up on graphics anyway, so this is only a minor detraction.

I don't think I'll ever get used the way the camera changes with possession. The default camera shot is behind the play of the ball - somewhat logical, as the direction is controlled relative to the position of the camera. This necessitates a camera change when the other team gets the ball - and this is not handled smoothly at all. If you're moving left when an interception occurs you'll find yourself suddenly moving right (usually away from the person who intercepted the ball).

This is mitigated to some extent by the fact that you can change the camera to a side view reminiscent of Jonah Lomu Rugby (the Codemasters classic, not to be confused with last year's Rugby Challenge) - but this isn't ideal. In my experience playing in this view was quite buggy - the cut-out pass icons were misplaced and there was input lag when trying to pass the ball. I would recommend this viewpoint become the primary focus of the team for RLL3 - this would help the game's playability immensely.

My biggest issue with the game is actually quite subjective, but I feel like it lacks personality. Thanks to the canned animations the game never really conveys the essence of a real Rugby League match - players are simply either tackled or... not tackled. There's quite a bit going on in the background that the player doesn't see that decides between this, but it's all a bit moot, as numbers don't make the game.

It's reminiscent of the complaint PES players used to (justifiably) make about the FIFA series - that the ball and the player didn't ever seem like independent objects, and the game felt canned as a result. There's no chance of diving in underneath ball to attempt to disrupt a try, and the idea of intercepting a pass relies more on the canned animations and being in the right place at the right time than anything else.

If you think about FIFA, the game now conveys the effortless playstyle of Lio Messi with ease thanks to the interaction between the player and the ball. In Madden you have gang tackles, where three, or four, or five guys might all join in to put a guy down because the play calls for an emphatic finish. Watching Kobe drop a clutch three in 2K13 is either brilliant or crushing depending on whether he's on your team or not - but the point is, these things elicit emotion.

The closest you've got in RLL2 is watching Billy "The Terminator" Slater stomp through everyone on his way to another 90m try. The reliance on stats to create player interactions means that normally you're watching dice roll in the form of Rugby League action - except when Billy has the ball, where the stats weigh in his favour and you'd need to bite off more than his ear to stop him from trucking down for another try.

Other little things, like inconsistencies in the application of the ruleset, bug me endlessly. I've witnessed a number of forward passes that were allowed, and at the same time I've seen quite a few flat passes ruled forward.

The commentary is pretty light - you'll quickly hear lines repeated - and I'd like to think that it's more than just the Queenslander in me who has a problem with Phil Gould's work on the game. Twice in one game he referenced Elvis Presley saying "There's no place like home" and I honest to god have no idea why. It seemed to be just his attempt to fill dead air and discount The Wizard of Oz.

Let's face it - there's oodles of room for improvement available to the Big Ant for Rugby League Live 3, but they've improved leagues over the previous game. If they continue to build off this somewhat stable foundation there's hope for a future where we might get a good or great Rugby League game. Make no mistake - Rugby League Live 2 isn't a good game. But it is competent. And if the promise of competent - not good - play combined with basic knowledge of rugby league rules is enough for you, enjoy cheering for the cockroaches next Origin. Oh, and crack out your $100 - Rugby League Live 2 is the game for you.