Rugby Challenge 2006 Review

On the plus side, at least they've made Rugby Challenge 2006 easy to play. If you're going to give developer Swordfish Studios credit for anything, it's that it's taken the most convoluted ball sport known to man and turned it into a videogame that just about anybody can pick up and play.

Not the sort of chap you'd want to meet down the back of a long dark alley.

You pick up the ball, you pass down the wings using the trigger buttons, you dodge the incoming tackles and you cross the line for a try. It's literally as simple as that. There are a few handy tutorials to get you into the swing of things, but providing you know how to hold a joypad the right way up you'll get a good, flowing game of rugby in no time at all.

Given Swordfish's long and impressive rugby heritage (this is the development team responsible for the legendary Jonah Lomu Rugby on PSone) you'd expect a fun, easy game, and that's what you get. The issue here is that it's too simple and as a result totally lacking in the depth.

The fact is, very little has been done to improve things since Swordfish's last rugby effort (the reasonably entertaining World Championship Rugby, released nearly two years ago just in time to miss the whole England World Cup furore). By altering the scrum and maul controls from button-bashing to reaction tests Swordfish thought it must have made things infinitely more tactical, but it's completely missed the point. It's not the technical rugby aspects that needed improving (they're far too involved to properly recreate in a game); it's the running, passing and kicking areas that needed work and virtually nothing has been done to better them. Where are the shimmying runs, the hand offs, the tactical kicks into touch and the up-and-unders? Yeah, you can kick the ball in Rugby Challenge 2006, but next to just recycling the ball out to the wings it's virtually redundant.

he tackle animations are good. All five of them.

The other big problem with Rugby Challenge 2006 is that it's hands-down one of the ugliest sports game ever to appear on this generation of consoles. Getting thirty-plus men to move smoothly on screen at once is always going to be a challenge, but did it have to be at the expense of so much player detail? Seriously, it looks like half the players were baptised in the chip shop by mistake. The audio isn't much better either, John Inverdale's commentary amounting to nothing more than a few perfunctory observations at best. This really is aesthetics by the numbers.

At least there's plenty of content to Rugby Challenge 2006, far more so than ever appeared in World Championship Rugby. The World and European club competitions are still there, obviously, but it's the addition of the Premiership, Celtic and Super 14 teams to the scrum that really add weight to the package, especially if you're a regular rugby watcher (it's like FIFA suddenly remembering to include Arsenal if you're after a football analogy). There's a decent range of cups and leagues to plough through, a throwaway "classic match" mode and a passable take off of PES's Master League for those looking to indulge in some long-term gaming. Not groundbreaking, but you gets your money's worth, certainly.