Wembley Rugby League

The Good
The sound effects add a lot to the atmosphere. All the rules of Rugby League have been accurately recreated, which gives the game novelty value if you aren't a League fan, and a real place in your mind if you are, as perhaps the only chance to play the game on computer.

There is a wide range of options, allowing for different match lengths, 10 difficulty levels, weather conditions, optional knock-ons and more.

Controls work well, making it easy to thread a pass through, and often giving the opportunity to offload the ball during the tackle, therefore avoiding using one of your set of 6 tackles, and giving a chance to spread the play and surprise the opposition

The Bad
The team who concedes a score always kicks off, which means that the team who've just scored are immediately back in possession. This makes it too easy to score a succession of points, on occasion I managed 20 without reply, before losing the ball and then conceding 12 without reply. As with (American) Football, the game isn't nearly as much fun when you don't have possession anyway.

The manual is not only insultingly basic, suggesting that those who aren't familiar with the sport read a book about it, but is also little help for playing the game, and certainly won't win converts to the sport.

The menu system is quite awkward, using the joystick to move a cursor (slowly) with no mouse support. In particular, it's annoying that to select a team, you have to go into a team selection page off another menu, rather that simply choosing it from a list immediately before playing,.

The Bottom Line
With a few rule differences from rugby union, and more of an emphasis on gradual progressive play rather than long kicks and optimistic chases, rugby league is quite suited to computer game rendition.

Wembley Rugby League stands alone as an individual product. On a technical level it works extremely well and should provide a lasting challenge, although the company's World Class Rugby has more mass popularity and perhaps more glamour to the range of teams and players. Viewed in isolation it all makes for a good game though.