Two rugby games have been released within a span of a week of one another. For such a niche sport (in the world of video games), I’m not sure that was in anyone’s greatest interest, but nonetheless rugby fans get a choice: Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge 4 is a sequel by a team that has been making rugby games for a while now, and Rugby 25 is by Big Ant Studios, a team that hasn’t worked on rugby in a very long time. I thought it would be fun to do a comparative review of them both, so here we are.
Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge 4 (Nintendo Switch)
The first thing you need to know is if you’re going to play this on Nintendo Switch, be prepared to put up with a big downgrade on what you can get on other platforms. The character models are terrible and in cut scenes or replays the frame rate seems to drop to single figures. The in-game action is smooth enough and zoomed out enough that it’s playable… and at least it’s on Switch in the first place (Big Ant decided not to do the port of Rugby 25), but just go in expecting something raw.
No matter what version of Rugby Challenge you play, there are merits to it. The single biggest advantage that it has over Big Ant’s effort is the passing game, which is smooth and dynamic. You can “queue up” passes while the ball is in mid-air before it has reached the next player, and that allows you to distribute the ball right across your team and out to the flanks as you need it.
However, the kicking game is deficient and most of the time your efforts to push the line of the game back through a kick will be stifled and the ball will be charged down. There are some tactics that you can choose between, but that happens at the end of the ruck and far too frequently, because the interface provides information poorly, you spend so much time reading that information that the game continues without you.
Even when you’re more used to the system there aren’t that many tactical plays and even at the lowest difficulty setting the AI is a pretty effective wall, so much of the game is simply getting into rucks and hoping that you can find enough open air by getting the ball to your furthest wing that they can make some progress down the field.
One other thing that I found particularly worthy in the game is the ability to tailor team personalities and behaviours via a multitude of sliders. Through this, you can ensure that each team you play has subtle differences and requires a subtly different set of tactics to overcome. Unfortunately, on the flip side, the career and competition modes are a little undone by injuries being far too frequent and decimating your teams within a few matches, but at least for single-play games those variable team personalities help keep the game fresh and make it worthwhile to play against different teams.
Rugby Challenge doesn’t really have licenses (aside from Jonah Lomu). It has teams – both domestic and international, but the rosters are made up, kits and logos are generic, and nothing that could be considered a licensable brand is in there. You’ll need to spend a lot of time in the editor just converting names, let alone trying to massage the team to actually look approximate to anything in the real world.
If licenses don’t matter too much to you, though, then there’s a basic, but halfway reasonable game of rugby available in Rugby Challenge 4. It’s not going to be something that you spend hundreds of hours with, but for some quick play, it scratches an itch.
Rugby 25 (Sony PlayStation 5)
Rugby 25 is a vastly (vastly) more ambitious game than Rugby Challenge. It starts with the licenses: Just about every rugby nation has been licensed into Rugby 25. Ever wanted to set up a match between Isle of Man and Mongolia? Play through the Bangladesh league? These minnows and minor competitions join all the World Cup teams and many of the major global leagues, making up quite literally hundreds of licensed teams and a game that, perhaps for the first time with rugby, fully reflects its nature as a global sport.
It’s excellent and an ambitious project, however, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are also issues with the licensing. Rosters outside of the tiny few very top teams are… not accurate. My precious Japanese Brave Blossoms team, for example, has an awful lot of very white boys in it, very few Japanese players, and many of the real-world Japanese team missing from it. And Japan is not a minor rugby club – the country hosted a World Cup and is ranked just outside of the top 10. You can imagine how shaky the application of the licenses gets when you start talking about Palestine or Turks & Caicos, or even mid-weight teams like Spain or the USA.
Additionally, as a side-note: I do appreciate the disclaimer that appears in the player roster profile images saying “procedurally generated player visual.” It’s a useful note for making it clear that Big Ant hasn’t had the time or opportunity to do a proper likeness of a player in a team. However, Rugby 25 has a habit of procedurally generating a lot of white players, even in teams where they would be fleetingly rare. I’m pretty sure there are more white people in the DR Congo’s rugby team than there are in the actual country, for example. For the sake of authenticity if nothing else, Big Ant should probably consider setting up its random generators to at least create players from the correct ethnicity for their respective teams.
Putting that digression aside, it is genuinely impressive that there is such a depth of team and competition licenses. One of my favourite FIFA games of all time was a World Cup edition that allowed you to take the absolute rank-bottom minnows and take a crack at both qualification and glory, and Rugby 25 offers shades of that (it would be nice to actually have a “road to the World Cup” mode here, but you can create one for yourself easily enough). The game also looks great, with the many stadia from around the world glistening in the engine and player models looking chunky on the field. The real players that Big Ant has actually rendered look particularly lifelike and as close to the “AAA” standard of an EA or 2K Games title as you could hope for from a much lower-budget production.
It’s difficult to review the on-field gameplay because there’s already been something like four patches since the game launched, and Big Ant is following its typical MO of improving the game in real-time as the feedback rolls in. What I can say is that it’s already significantly better than the state it launched in, and I do assume that, much like AFL in particular, the end result is going to be a very high-quality take on the sport.
It’s just not quite there yet. My biggest issue with the game, currently, is the lack of fluidity in the passing. Unlike with Rugby Challenge, in Rugby 25 you can’t queue passes up and the player will need to have the pass secured before they can pass it on. This results in some stilted play and makes it difficult to set up a play where you pass up and down the line to the wings.
On the plus side, the depth of the passing game is far better, with it being much easier to distribute the pass behind the line to the kickers. That, plus the fact that it’s much harder to force a turnover via rucks etc unless the teams are very unevenly matched, means that Rugby 25 comes across as a more thoughtful and technical rugby game. The lack of specific tactical plays to choose from undermines that a little but you will find yourself making use of the same tactics as in real-world rugby to try and break down a defence.
Beyond the design decisions, there are some mechanical issues that Big Ant really needs to look at via its patches as well. For a start, the stamina system is currently totally broken, because it seems to have been balanced (and tested) to suit the highest-quality teams. A New Zealand or even Japan can get through a match with the stamina of players declining at roughly a parallel rate to what you see go on in a real match. I tried to play as Palestine, however (good on Big Ant for including Palestine!), who has a much (much) lower rating, and my players’ stamina was totally wiped within, literally, the first few minutes of the game. This means that while there is a noble effort to put hundreds of teams in the game, only a dozen or so are truly playable right now. It’s just not enjoyable playing with lower-rated teams.
It’s also much too hard to understand just how to structure defence and push the opponents into making an error. Rugby Challenge 4 probably goes a little too far in the other direction by making ruck turnovers a frequent feature, but in Rugby 25 – particularly as the team’s stamina depletes, there doesn’t seem to be any way to actually create a turnover situation. Even on the very easiest difficulty setting, when I was playing a team with disproportional strength (Japan vs. Israel, for example), the last 20 or so minutes was just a matter of endless defence. Tackle after tackle after tackle. You can imagine how much harder it would be when trying to play as a more evenly matched (or even weaker) team.
Finally, one area where Big Ant has always struggled is the AI. Unlike Rugby Challenge with all those team-by-team personality sliders, every team in Rugby 25 plays the same way. On attack they’ll almost never pass more than once. On defence, they’ll follow the exact same patterns. In fact, here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. When I was playing that Japan vs. Israel match, right at the end of the match where I was significantly ahead, I kicked the ball across the field. Their fullback took it and immediately kicked it back to just inches off the touch line. In the very next match, as luck would have it, as Palestine playing Isle of Man, I kicked the ball in roughly the same area right at the start and… the AI did exactly the same thing, with some incredible precision. The ball landed in almost exactly the same spot of the field. This moment struck me because it was four entirely different teams and yet… it looked like exactly the same game was being played.
That’s easy to chalk up to coincidence, but the reality is that, yes, there are stats that are being crunched behind the game and out of sight that make it slightly easier or more difficult to win a match (depending on the match-up). Otherwise, however, you could paint any set of team colours over any match and it will look and feel the same. This is obviously not an issue when you play with a friend and they’re bringing their human intelligence to the match, but if you feel like there’s a lack of personality when playing single-player Rugby 25, that’s why: Australia plays exactly the same way as New Zealand, which plays the same way as Libya.
I realise that this review comes across as a laundry list of criticisms, but the reality is that all of it can be fixed by patches, and with the exception of the AI and personality of the teams, I fully expect that Big Ant will do just that. That is what happened with the Big Ant AFL, cricket and tennis games. The only thing that’s never been addressed in any of these titles is the lack of AI, and once fully patched, nothing gets in the way of the game being a good time. I can already tell from this foundation that over the next year or so Rugby 25 is going to be one of the finest takes we’ve seen of the sport. If not the finest.
It makes scoring the game tricky, and the score you’ll see right below here is more reflective of where I think the game will end up than where it is right now, but Big Ant’s earned the benefit of the doubt and until they fail to deliver, I’ll continue to give it to them.
