Review: Rugby 15 Is A Hot Mess | EGMR

There’s no career mode, so to speak. There’s a few tournament modes for players to take a look at, but no dedicated season-over-season team management mode which could be used as a continuous time sink. Indeed, career mode isn’t the only key sports game feature that Rugby 15 is missing, but it’s the one that players would have clocked the most hours in if they could bear to press on with the game. That said, they probably wouldn’t be able to, given that the game glitches whenever the full time whistle is supposed to sound, trapping players in a purgatory of an eternally bouncing ball, or some such nonsense.
We mentioned that Rugby 15 was missing another couple of sports game staples, namely online mode and instant replay. There is a conspicuous lack of a mode dedicated to online play, and we’re thankful for this small mercy – we really did not want to have to try and compete with this game’s glitches and badly implemented systems with the addition of lag and connectivity issues. That said, it’s still unforgivable that such a core part of sports games – the multiplayer – is lacking.

As far as the instant replay goes, we can’t recall ever seeing any replays – even skippable in-game ones, nor mini-cutscenes which pan past the players or the crowds, which again is somewhat of a relief, as both seem to move like mechanised cardboard cut-outs. The game lacks in fundamental features, and it doesn’t get much better once you get to the meat of the gameplay.

We’re not really sure how to approach this without long-winded paragraphs berating every aspect of the in-game systems, so we’re going to put them into point form to isolate each mechanic on its own.

• Running is clunky and inertia is easily thwarted:
  Running in this game simply requires you to push the left analogue stick in the direction you want to go to initiate a full-tilt sprint across the field. Changing directions completely will cause your player to have to compensate for inertia and slow down temporarily, but this can be easily overcome by taking a slightly gentler turn – 90 degrees at a time, instead of 180.
• The passing is broken:
  Passing is done by pressing the R2 (or equivalent) button and pointing the analogue stick in the general direction you want it to go. The reason we say direction and don’t specify which player is because that’s the general accuracy of the passing. Passes will regularly find opposition players, or bounce meekly away from players who were making surprisingly incisive runs through the defence. This is no better off in set pieces such as scrums, because the ball will often go flying far further than you intended.

• Set pieces are badly built minigames:
  Set pieces are an issue unto themselves – we could devote a paragraph to each, but it would all amount to the same thing – each set piece, excluding the lineouts, which we’ll come back to – devolves into some power struggle-centric mini-game, that involves you angling your right analogue stick and pushing R2.These are badly built because they work against the general flow of a rugby game, causing turnovers to be conceded more than possession is retained. Lineouts are another issue: You pick one of three groups of players and throw the ball that way and then that group of players gets it; there’s no threat from the defending team because the defensive manoeuvre is so clunky and unresponsive that by the time your group of players manages to lift your flailing catcher, the other team have already scored a try, waited for the game to end and headed off to the pub for post-game drinks.
• The kicking is actually really good:
  No, that can’t be right. Something good in this game? Unthinkable. Surprisingly though, the kicking is really good, the ball physics mean everything from the way the player kicks it to what type of kick you choose to use affects where the ball goes, and how it will bounce when it hits the ground. The players trying to catch it are another story altogether, but we’ll give praise where it’s due. The spot kicking is equally as good, and it feels well-weighted, and accurate to the motion of the analogue stick you kicked it with.

And that’s about it really – all this badly built gameplay leads to is a fairly hilariously broken experience. It’s not a good game, by any stretch of the imagination and it’s not one I’d recommend anyone buying, but it has the appeal of a B-movie; it may be terrible, it may be poorly made, but it is the funniest thing I’ve played this year, purely because of how horrid it is.
That said, it’s inexcusably bad. For a game that’s releasing on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, it’s sorely limited and looks terrible. The gameplay is questionable at the best of times and nigh-unplayable at the worst, there’s tons of bugs that need to be addressed and there’s a lot of fundamental gameplay mechanics missing. If you’re looking for a good rugby game, Rugby 15 is certainly not what you’re looking for.