Rugby 06 Critic Reviews

Rugby fans, EA Sports have finally given us a great game worthy of the hard-hitting European sport. EA Sports Rugby 06 not only looks like a realistic game of rugby but it also plays like a dream.

An enjoyable rugby game. Tutorial and practice mode are helpful for beginners, but scrums, rucks and mauls are still pretty hard to play. Passing game is done extremely well.

EA spruced up this year's installment with off-load tackling, aka, you can now pass as you're being driven into the mud.

With its plethora of leagues, tournaments, and cups Rugby 06 should be any diehard rugby fans' dream come true, but in order to reel in the rest of the sports crowd the game had to bring more than authentic rugby teams, and it has done exactly that.

Rugby 06 improves upon its predecessor in almost every way. Breaking through the defense for a try or nailing an opponent with a high-tackle is immensely satisfying. The additions of the off-load pass and impact players, while subtle, improve the gameplay experience and help the game more closely resemble the actual sport.

Rugby 06 finally offers the full range of Premiership, Celtic and Southern Hemisphere club teams, not to mention exhibition sides such as the Barbarians and New Zealand Maoris. That's, like, three times as many sides as "Rugby 2005."

Rugby, with its elaborate set-pieces and impenetrable laws, is a hard game to render on computer, but this is an extremely good try.

It has a steep enough learning curve that it requires some definite determination to stick with the game long enough to begin enjoying it.

Thanks to some crucial new control mechanics, the introduction of star impact players that can blow a match wide open, real clubs and players, and a faithful re-creation of the high-impact sport of rugby, Rugby 06 improves on last year's effort and remains an engaging and fun game.

This game makes you want to watch a televised match to learn more. Good luck on that.

Following the action and its muddle of player bodies is the only real issue, and a tighter, less far-flung camera could have fixed it.

The best looking and playing rugby game of the year, but there's still a few things that need tweaking before it's a genuine classic.

A surprisingly fast paced hard-hitting sports game that'll catch any unsuspecting sports fan's eye.

In the end, Rugby '06 is what I think real Rugby players will gravitate to. It's authentic, and that is always something EA is good at.

EA releases a gentle and promising introduction the popular sport of Rugby, with fluid action, decent selection of gameplay modes and tidy visuals.

If Rugby 06 is anything to go by, then future iterations of the franchise will only continue to get stronger and better, since this is by far the best rugby game to date. The flow of the game is more realistic than ever before, with the introduction of offloads, and quick penalties/line-outs working together to bring the game closer to the modern sport of rugby.

Rugby 06 just doesn't begin to fix those flaws and the addition of a very few new features, coupled with possibly the worst commentary I've heard in a sports game for a long time, mean that the game just doesn't do enough.

I came into Rugby 06 with an open mind, I was hoping for the FIFA engine with rugby elements and I was let down.