Containing, once again, both the NFL and NFL Players Association licenses, you will see most of your favorite players taking to the gridiron in the riotous romp to the goal line. 989 has injected more than 350 player animations from real NFL players to make things ubiquitously NFL-like. The game employs the use of over 125 real taunts from players like Marshall Faulk, Terrell Davis and Charles Woodson.

In addition to all this yummy trash talkin' jive, Xtreme offers some serious over-the-top arcade action. You can pass behind the line-of-scrimmage, go out-of-bounds and back in, and even ram the crap out of a downed player (several times if you like) without fear of being penalized! There are hits galore, tossing players overhead like the incredible hulk and tons of other crazy tackles and hits that will make your head hurt just looking at them.

Added to the mix are 150 player celebrations, used by players that are comprised of 400 polygons for that bulging muscle-man look. The players are modeled to be quite large in appearance and their helmets (very curiously) swell to the size of a watermelon when they remove them to talk s**t.

The game is a strict arcade five-on-five football romp, that sports more than 700 real players faces. Relative sizes are exhibited by having linemen larger and beefier than their running back and wide receiver counterparts. Players can perform moves like power shoulder charges, double spins, flip over defenders, super jukes, and crazy-hard stiff arms, clothesline tackles and more.

Graphically this game is much batter than last years. Players are larger, as mentioned, and they do animate with a nicer degree of finesse than before. New animations seen thus far include handstands, roundhouse kicks, back flips and a sweet break dancing maneuver. This game is just buck wild. The field shows damage when there is rain, mud, snow and stuff like that. You will even see splashes of water with player's strides.

Play calling is much more streamlined than last year. In last year's game, the play-calling interface was too complex and not as arcade-like as Blitz. This year the play calling is very simple, and the number of play selections has been reduced to speed up the game play. The overall experience is much more akin to what the developers had in mind last year, but were unable to implement. This game stands very much improved, and the AI is Xtremely aggressive. However, it does some rather strange things in terms of the passing game.

There are two passing interfaces; the icon-based and the CPU controlled one-button method. Passing behind the line of scrimmage can be done so long as the player with the ball has not crossed that line. The AI bug comes into play when passing. You cannot loft passes that the receiver can use his peed to run underneath. Each time a pass is thrown, the receiver will, instead, stop and leap to grab the pass.

One problem that arises, beyond the passing anomaly, is with the taunts. NFL ball players do not necessarily hold Actor's Guild cards, and their canned renditions of natural trash-talk come off very corny indeed. You don't ask a 320 pound lineman to read a script to say, "You can't handle me boy!" into a microphone. What you do is go the field and capture this stuff naturally as it happens. Editing can remove the expletives used on the field I am sure?! Anyway, this is NFL Xtreme's one big blemish.

That aside, the game is near where the developers wanted it to be in terms of presentation and overall feel. Although they seemingly have removed far too many original features than were necessary to make things move along a bit more briskly. Things like the manner in which forward progress of the ball was handled have been mysteriously altered…and for what? Last year if you were thrown forward by an aggressive tackler you picked up the forward progress. Now when this occurs the play is marked at the point of contact. This changes the manner in which the game is played somewhat I am not sure many players will appreciate. I am sure there was a reason, but this was one of the elements of Xtreme that served to heighten the intensity of the match. Oh well…better luck next time!