At the time of this review I have 14 hours in the game. I cannot recommend this game at this time. The real fun and unique part of the game is that you can take teams from different eras and play them in a season with teams of that season. I took the 85 bears and played them in this year’s football season. If that has a huge draw for you, then the game might be worth the money.
The issue with the game is there is no active play, it is really all strategy. That would be fine if the strategy was deeper. The problem is the draft/FA/play design/depth charts/rosters are all shallow.
If you are looking for a game where you can make meaningful decisions for a football team look someplace else.
I will quickly go over the things missing.
The rosters are not full. You have to have X or Y of each position and there is no changing players positions or moving guys to other positions.
The offense play design only allows you grab routes from similar depths. So you can have deep routes, all intermediate routes or all short routes. Also the ball gets thrown to the primary receiver ~70% of the time.
There is no cap. There are no contracts. The game randomly generates a few players to be FAs each year on each team. The FA go into a draft. It is very lame and not like anything that resembles football FA.
The draft is not terrible. They allow you to scout 20 players. You get all the info on the 20 players you scout and zero info on any other player.
I don’t think there is enough strategy in this game. It offers nothing other than strategy so, I am not sure where the value is.