I played it last night and was seriously disappointed. Here's what I took from it after a few games
1. Graphics are muck, every player looks the same when you're in normal gameplay, impossible to tell if you're giving the ball to Jamie Heaslip or Mike Ross off the edge of a ruck.
2. Player likenesses for Ireland at least are atrocious. Sean O'Brien looks like a skinny schools player and has a really long neck, sexton looks nothing like himself, Darcy is just a generic brown haired average height bloke, even think Paulie might have brown hair in it.
3. Squads are way off too. No Flannery or Boss in the extended World Cup squad, I can understand not having Murray or Ryan as the squad was only named in the last week but those other guys should be in it.
4. Ferris is black, no idea how that was allowed happen. In a soccer game you might excuse that mistake for a team of Ireland's calibre but in rugby we're top 5 or 6 in the world, you couldn't imagine FIFA having Nicolas Anelka running around as a short white dude. Big c**k up and points to their lack of real effort here.
5. It's the same game as Rugby 08 only worse. Less teams, no customisation.
6. There doesn't seem to have been much effort to make the player stats accurate. O'Brien didn't break a single tackle and even got dumped by Ben Foden at one point. Rory Best flies around the place like an NFL running back.
7. On the version I played at least, when you play friendlies you can't wear the official jerseys just these awful looking versions that are miles off the actual shirts.
8. The backs seem to line up in a very odd way, in a 10 minute game I played I only got the ball to outside centre once, most of the time the 10 gets the ball to inside centre then the next man out is the openside winger. When I finally got the ball to Drico, Miles Harrison shouts out "Excellent running from Mick O'Driscoll", what???
9. The commentary is pretty useless. I remember when the demo came out people saying how enjoyable it was and that is was much better than 08. It's very limited and not that entertaining at all.
Overall this is a shoddy game. I'll hang on to it until RC comes out then either offload it to one of my younger cousins who won't notice how pants the whole thing is or trade it in. Really disappointed in this game as a whole. Feel like almost every element of the game, graphics, gameplay, customisation, depth, was better in Rugby 08.