overall I find this game fun despite all of the bugs and flaws of the gameplay. The ai do not get any more adcanced as the difficulty rating is increased instead they just make tackles much more accurately, and their ruckspeed is like instant, and very annoying to play against. It is very difficult to win your own rucks on max difficulty unless u have a pod of support right there with u. If u don't have at least 2 players as the first ones in a ruck u will lose it. In saying that I still find the hardest ai difficulty much too easy, and i have had to revert to playing the leagues as the worst team, such as winning the world cup as tonga, to have any sort of competition.
Now the bugs, the main one ruining the game for me is when using the passback feature to pass from the ruck to a kicker behind waiting to clear, around 50% of the time the halfback will run directly backwards at your kicker or another player in the backline will block the kick, causing a unintentional offside and a scrum awarded to the opponent. For me this is the most frustrating one, and happens multiple times per game as the box kicks have rubbish distance and kicking from set piece or ruck play any other way is quite difficult. Thirdly, there is a weird glitch where the players nearest the ruck run away from the ruck, then come back taking several seconds which in the highest ai difficulty means losing the ball. ON defence this also happens, with your players running from one side of the field to another to get to a specific spot, whilst another player runs the opposite direction to fill the hole the other player just vacated. Overall makes no sense to me whatsoever and makes defending quite annoying. The grubber kick is also way to op to the point where I banned myself from using it because the game became too easy.
I do love rugby and I have played this game lots and will continue to do so until rugby 25 gets better, and I also know that it is very unlikely that any of the issues that I experience will be fixed as the game is now 3 years old, so this is more just a rant for me but anyway. The game has a good platform in my opinion and I just wish some of the issues around the ruck and the clearing kcik were fixed whihc would make the game ten times more playable and enjoyable.
