Rugby: The World Cup

The Good
Kicking the conversions works quite well. The potential for fast running play is there. The better player usually wins in 2-player games. Scrums, lineouts, kicks, passes and drop-goals are all recreated. The basic gameplay was good fun at times.

The Bad
The ruck-and-maul element of rugby is gone - every tackle results in an instant scrum. This would be okay, except that these are pure joystick-waggling tedium, appear to give no advantage to the team with the put-in (a crucial error which makes progressing methodically up the field much more random) and vary from easy to near-impossible depending on the ability of your team. The same criticisms apply to the line-outs (which have another major flaw - as you receive the ball you get virtually no time to do anything with it, especially as you will have been waggling to gain control until the second you see the ball go to your scrum-half.

The AI is perhaps the worst I've ever seen in a sports game - your team-mates follow you en masse, rather than getting into positions for passes. All of this combines to make running the only logical play method. If you get tackled for a scrum and lose it, just wait for the opponent to miss a pass.

The menus are incredibly basic, with very few options, and the group tables presented in inexplicably small barely-legible writing, despite acres of space around them.

The Bottom Line
One of only two rugby titles for the Amiga at the time, they intentionally simplified the rules - apparently to make for a less complicated more flowing (soccer-esque?) game. Play friendlies or the full world cup. The action is viewed from a Kick Off style overhead view, switching to a 3D view for conversions. Was seemingly rush-released in time for the 1991 World Cup, which explains many of the faults. This got some good reviews at the time - I would question those people's understanding of rugby, or of computer sports games in general.