Rugby 06

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.

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 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."

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. [Apr 2006, p.77]

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.