Backbreaker is a great attempt at providing some healthy competition to EA’s Madden series in the American football genre, and even though it falls short to them in some ways, the game does manage to hold its own ground in other areas. This allowed it to build quite a solid fanbase, and you can easily find a lot of players playing it online (despite some of the main criticisms toward it being aimed at its multiplayer capabilities).

Gameplay

In Backbreaker, you’ll get to choose from some fictional teams (as the license for using names from the national league is held by EA and used in Madden), and there’s a high degree of customization available when creating your own. You can import or create your own logo, as well as completely define your players’ looks by picking the colors of their clothes and their accessories.

There’s a strong emphasis on realism when it comes to physics, and the game uses the famous Euphoria engine, complete with a PhysX add-on, in order to very realistically simulate player collisions and other elements related to physics. There are few pre-defined animations, instead the outcome of most actions is determined by the physics system.

As we mentioned above, there are some issues with the game’s online play, mainly in the form of lag and other disturbances, as well as poor inter-player control. That is, you’ll find it somewhat challenging to perform proper passes, not to mention the nightmare you’ll have to endure if you’re up against someone with a high latency – but if you play against a selected range of players with a good connection, the game becomes quite enjoyable.

Graphics and System Requirements

We mentioned that Backbreaker uses the Euphoria engine, and apart from the ultra-realistic physics, you’ll also get plenty of eye candy to gaze your eyes on. Everything comes with a high-resolution texture on it, even the grass you’re running on – actually, the grass looks especially nice for some reason. The crowd is animated nicely, and you’ll have to really look hard to find any similar groups of characters in it, which is common for some other titles.

The Euphoria engine is known for being very light on systems as well, and it shouldn’t take a very good computer to run the game properly, so a lot of players should get to enjoy it in its fullest. Still, make sure that your processor is top notch, as all those physics calculations come at a cost, despite looking so attractive.

Other

You may quickly find yourself moving towards the online play, as the single player campaign lasts rather shortly and you’ll probably wish that it offered a bit more for you to explore. Still, the depth of the game’s multiplayer more than makes up for that flaw, in our view.

Conclusion

It may not be the “Madden killer” that it was hoped to become, but Backbreaker is still a remarkably good game with plenty of room for improving your skill and enjoying a competitive gameplay.