When it comes to sports games I’ll admit that aside from regular games of Rocket League almost daily I’ve been a lapsed fan. Way back in the SNES, era my friends and I played a load of them together in college, and we had a great time together. I remember being pretty amazed by Madden in the early days, and even dabbled in play as it made the transition into full-on 3D graphics, albeit in a pretty primitive form in those early days. Now, coming back to it all a few decades later, I’ll openly admit it’s pretty damned overwhelming, both in good and bad ways.

From a presentation standpoint, it’s wild to see how far things have come from those earlier days and then jumping to today. For people who have been along for the ride through every iteration or two, I have no doubt that it’s harder to appreciate the level everything is at now, where the distance between watching the game and playing it continues to get smaller, but to my eyes it’s all pretty incredible. It’s more than just the active play though, between the pretty seamless (though still not infallible) in-game commentary, transition graphics, and focus on the whole presentation, the game pops.

A downside of the overwhelming nature of the game is that especially for the first 10 - 20 minutes, I was hit by a wave of everything not to do with getting down to having some fun, and I’ll admit it was a little irritating. I can appreciate the fun of including collectables that aren’t just for show, but can also be used to form your true Ultimate Team fantasy league style, or to boost the stats of your players in various ways. That’s all pretty cool, especially since so much of it seemed to be based on points you earn through play. But at the same time, it’s a lot to take in right out of the gate. Trying to just find a way to get things rolling to try out some gameplay took more time than I would have preferred, but once you’ve gotten started you can thankfully get down to business.

Perhaps this is an issue exclusive to people like me who are so out of touch with the evolution of the series over the decades, but I also had a terrible time settling into what kicking and passing schemes I wanted to use. While there were plenty of training options, including ones that seemed to get pretty deep into basic football concepts, all of which I did appreciate, the shame is that I couldn’t find something that would walk me through the control style I had chosen. You could suck at passing or kicking without the pressure of a game as you try to get the hang of the specifics for how they work and feel, but it still felt more trial and error than I’d have preferred. Perhaps, buried somewhere, there’s something that could have helped me out better, but I stumbled through enough practice snaps that it began to come together a little better without it, and perhaps that’s how people are assumed to learn best anyway.

In the critical area of performance, I’m not going to lie… it’s not exactly an impressive story on brand new hardware. While the game is absolutely playable, including in handheld mode which didn’t feel like it did any worse than the game when docked, even for someone who tends to not get hung up on framerates and performance, it was impossible not to see some visual hiccups here and there. Thankfully, I didn’t notice it so much in-game as in the presentation moments to open or close out the game more specifically, but at times even on the field the game could feel a hair sluggish at times. Granted, it’s quite possible a patch could help improve things greatly, or even the edition next year could more confidently tune the experience to the hardware, but for people obsessed with framerate you’re doomed to be disappointed.

Taking everything into account, the fact that you can very viably play a game like this on the go or at home without significant compromises to play is impressive. Not having played it on other more powerful platforms it could be that I have a blindspot to some of the sacrifices that could have been made to have it happen, but I’m honestly just thrilled that Nintendo is again able to pull in AAA sports titles that have been sorely missed for quite some time. For old folks like me who’ve been out of the game, it’s a helluva time to enjoy everything the upgrade brings, you’ll just need to be patient. For all of the people who are less out of date, the ability to play it anywhere should be a pretty great incentive. Regardless, if you’re a huge football fan who enjoys the game and would love exploring play with your favorite team, making one of your own, or simply having loads of options for how you play, this is a great overall package.