Ultimate Pro Football Coach

If you like the AFM genre then this one's a no-brainer; definitely worth giving it a chance. If you're new and on the fence, it's one of the more newbie-friendly iterations to cut your teeth on. It's not as complicated as Front Office Football or Draft Day Sports: Pro Football, but in some ways that's a good thing, and there's still plenty of depth and challenge to keep you busy having fun with it for a long time. Pros: - Good options when starting a new game. No fantasy draft yet, but dev stated intentions to add it. - Cool ideas WRT team and equipment sponsors that give passive bonuses, and Coach Power that you use to train staff, negotiate lowball contracts, etc. - Good workflow that guides you (or forces you) to do all the important things before advancing. - Good selection of offensive/defensive schemes. Players that match your chosen scheme have significantly increased stats. - The Roster screen is one of the best I've seen when it comes to helping you decide who to cut, trade, re-sign, etc. each season. - Separate team finances and salary cap to manage. - Good staff mechanics to hire and develop your coaching tree. - Convenient trading features that show you interested teams instead of making you hunt manually for trade partners. - Create-a-play is well done. They seem to have all the basics covered. - The in-game emails are well written and fun to read. - No UI can ever be perfect for a game like this, but it's better than most. - Dev is active in the forums and seems to genuinely care about making it better. Cons/Subjective: - You can only call offensive plays, never defensive. If your DC is a "Zone Blitz" type, then I guess you're always running a zone blitz play? - The list of plays you can choose from is randomized. But if it weren't, it'd probably be too easy. It's still possible to beat better teams with smart play calling. - Training is weird. It seems you just select one position group (QBs, Receivers, Linebackers, etc) to train for the entire season. - Scouting is weird. I tell my scouts to focus on finding players with the West Coast trait, but they still scout players with other traits like Run and Gun. - Outside of the draft, there's no obvious way to initiate trading away your draft picks. You have to start trading a player, then remove the player and add your picks.

So far I have really enjoyed playing this football sim. It is pretty much the same game that I enjoyed on mobile all those years ago, but with the in-app purchases that ruined the core gameplay removed. What I really like: it is fun to play through seasons and build up a team that can be competitive. On the normal setting, and with some other settings adjusted (e.g. the option that other teams will be more selective of whether they trade their star players or not), it provides a pretty good management simulation. I also enjoy the ability to create play calls, and to do offensive playcalling. What I don't like: There's the need to do too much jumping between screens. A small example: when initiating a trade, I cannot see what the other team's needs are on the trade screen. To do this, I need to go out and find the other team's main screen, and go to a separate tab to see what their needs are. Then I need to return to the trade screen. In terms of the actual match engine, the lack of penalties is a real immersion-breaking experience. It was the same with the mobile game, and it is unfortunately a big omission. All in all, it is a good start, and I hope to see the devs keep adding new features. Right now it is a fairly capable and fun American Football sim.

So, this is one of the few Reviews I write, but they deserve it. Background for me, I have most of their mobile games minus baseball because I know nothing about that sport. I have their college football, Pro Football, and the football (soccer for my fellow Americans) GM. Just like the mobile version of their game it rewards thinking and proper team building. You really have to think ahead, do you want to focus on Defense this draft because its loaded, or take your risk and aim for an offensive weapon that might help your rookie QB. Pros Team rating matters but doesn't. So, the game rewards play calling. When i first started playing I only aimed for key play calling. Don't do that unless you want to get mad you lost a close game you should of want because your Offensive Coordinator called bad play. Instead switch to calling all the plays and watch you get rewarded for your genius. You will stare at you screen like a proper head coach wonder to trust your Running back, Fullback, Tight End or WR core on a crucial 3 and goal. With 2 minutes on the clock, do you trust your Defense to stop them with a three-point lead, or do you say NOPE we are going for it on 4th and 2. 10 seconds left on the clock down by three on the 5-yard line. Do you trust your kicker to make this kick, or do you go for it because this game will send you to the playoffs. Don't need to spend real money. So, I spent money on the mobile games just to get ahead the mobile game is by no means a pay to play but I just get hate myself and want to win everything 24/7. But this time the entire engine has been tweaked. If you build around a player or group, you watch your wins go up. Example: Drafted a 4-star QB and gave him a decent O-line and a vet WR from free agency and drafted some decent players. Went from a 4-13 team to 7-10 the next season. After I traded some players and went 9-8. Building the team you want. The game improved on scheme fitting, you want to build an Air raid like offense you can, you want to build a ground and pound offense you can. You want to build a defense like the legion of boom you can. Remember you need a good DC and OC. They will improve your team greatly. Overall, the game is a huge improvement from the mobile game that scratches what I have been looking for in a Pro Football style game. Yes, they are still improving the game and have actively talked to players on reddit and stuff.

Defence might as well not exist. No matter how good your defence is, how good your playcaller is, their offence will still constantly batter you. So don't bother putting cap money there. And passing is overrated. Running is super OP. I've never gotten above 50 percent completion rate even with a 99 quarterback, but you can have a 79 rated halfback just batter them all game with the occasional fumble. Either the dev does't know how to play american football or sucks at game balance

Kinda missed the mark IMO. The UI feels very blocky and it's hard to absorb information.

Overall, I've enjoyed playing. I have played the mobile version quite a bit in the past. I feel like this mostly kept much of what worked well and corrected for what didn't. I do think the UI needs help. Odd sizing of windows (especially in the Hub view) is very clunky. There's also too many instances where I have to navigate in circles to refer to some information and return to my original screen (but can't through a simple back button click). I'll definitely still play more of the game, because there are many things about it I enjoy, but there are definitely some QoL improvements that could be made.

good sim, consistent updates...will improve

I want to start by saying that, as my playtime shows, I really enjoy this game. That said, there are a number of features and fixes I’d love to see added. I don’t expect all of these to be implemented, but I think each would meaningfully improve a game I already enjoy a lot. Stats, History & Records • Past matchups & history: Make all box scores and stats from previous games viewable. Hoop Land on mobile does this well — you can view past championships, standings, playoff brackets, awards, and full player stats for each season. • All-time stats viewing: Add an option to toggle that highlights players who have played for your current team. • All-time records: Viewable by career, season, single game, rookie season, and rookie game. • Career-high stats: Track career highs for each player. • Post-retirement stats: Keep each players overall rating that season attached to the season’s total stats after retirement, just like when they’re active. • Team history tracking: Counter for how many times each team has won a championship and how many times they’ve appeared in one. • Coach history: Track total winning seasons, playoff wins/losses, and previous teams/championships for coaches and staff. Awards & Achievements • Add Super Bowl MVP as an award. • Legacy missions: These feel overly difficult. In a 30-season run, I’ve only completed them about five times. Defensive points against seems nearly impossible — even with a 98 overall defense, I’ve never come close, despite only a handful of teams being above 90 overall. Roster, Players & Contracts • Edit Player Stats mode: Allow editing of player potential and current stats (separate mode or option). • Depth chart bug: Reordering the depth chart appears broken — it says changes are made, but the actual play order doesn’t update. • Contract renegotiation: Allow renegotiating contracts using PWR or a patience system. If talks drag on or the player gets annoyed enough, they won’t re-sign regardless of salary when the contract is up. • Retirement persuasion: Option to use PWR to persuade a player not to retire. Economy & Management • Gear supplier contracts: No incentive to sign multi-year deals since there’s no discount — it always makes sense to sign for one year. • Optional data tracking: If all the added stat tracking impacts sim speed, consider making some of it optional via settings. Simulation & Gameplay Balance • Realistic sim mode: A mode without tier goals. The game currently feels tuned around completing these, which eventually leads to an overpowered team that rarely loses.

I've played over 50 seasons of the mobile version of this game over the past 5+ years. Some of the issues from the mobile game aren't present here like rookie player value, mtx nonsense, and training points (pwr is a better system). I think the CPU +10 gear bs is also gone but I've only played about 5 seasons here. So what sucks? For starters, the entire UI is only interactable with your mouse. There are no keybindings, not even space or enter for simple confirmations. There still isn't an easy way to directly compare a staff member or coach to a potential hire without going back to your front office and checking their personality and intelligence. I find myself typing notes for quick comparisons to prevent excessive clicking back and forth between menus. The balance in the game is still out of whack. How does a rookie RB overall 86 rush for 46 TDs in a season. How does any player rush for 50 TDs. The greatest players in the NFL never broke 30 rushing TDs. Top 5 QBs are always passing for 5,000 yards like it's nothing, sometimes 6,000. Players regularly get 25+ sacks in a season. In the end, this is an arcade football sim similarly to Need For Speed as an arcade racing sim. It's worth the $20 if you're *really* into this type of thing but I wouldn't pick it up for more than $5-$10 otherwise.

I've just started playing the PC version on Steam, so I may have updates, but so far I'm enjoying the game immensely. I played the mobile game first, which is very similar. (I just finished my 100th season on the mobile game!) This game is very satisfying both generally as a resource management game and more specifically as a football management sim. Unlike other kinds of resource management games where the beginning is hard but then the game gets easy, the combination of the salary cap, the randomness of each year's draft, and the decline of player ability gives each season a new challenge. The game also has a developmental aspect in that you have team facilities that can be upgraded to help the team's performance. You have the option of coaching the games if you like, and this version lets you watch the play unfold. (The mobile game doesn't have that feature.) Or, you can just sim the games and get the results right away, which is what I do. You can also design custom pass plays. I'll be watching the online discussion to decide if this aspect of the game interests me. Personally, the fun for me is in the preseason. I sim through each season pretty quickly.