World Championship Rugby Review

6.8

Format PC

Developer Swordfish Studios

Publisher Acclaim

Genre Sports

If football's the cool kid at school, then rugby's his geeky brother who might be a laugh and have a complete set of Pokémon, but you wouldn't be seen dead with him in public.

Still, that hasn't stopped a couple of publishers trying to shoehorn the sport into the gaming limelight. First there was EA with its well-received Rugby series and now Acclaim's stepped onto the pitch to bring the world of macho man-hugging to a console near you.

Like other entries in the genre, World Championship Rugby prefers to keep the action arcade-orientated rather than attempting a full-on simulation of the sport. While this keeps the pace as close to blazing as you'll get in a rugby game, significant aspects of the sport, like shunting about in scrums, are reduced to skill-less button-mashing, severely damaging the sense of achievement you get from a victory.

Although WCR wields a rugby player's girth of tournament and championship options, wrapped slickly in some nicely realised on-pitch action, the game still lacks the attention to detail and wealth of licensed teams bursting from EA's offering - and that's the fundamental problem with it. It doesn't attempt to do things differently from what we've seen before - or enough to conquer current contenders.

CVG Staff