Rugby 22 review: Rugby's best video game in 15 years is let down by frustrating off-field flaws

It has long been a bone of contention that rugby union hasn't had a decent video game in a long, long time.

For many, Jonah Lomu Rugby, released in 1997, remains the pinnacle - a time capsule filled with Bill McLaren's quips that may never be topped.

For some, EA Sports' efforts - culminating with Rugby 08 - is the finest virtual form of rugby we have seen. Many dedicated fans still mod the title with updated squads, kits and stadiums some 15 years after its release. That was 2007.

It has been a long wait for anything resembling a quality game since then. In that time, rugby league and cricket have had their fair share of decent games made by independent publishers.

Rugby union may have seen a few titles made by smaller publishers since the likes of Codemasters and EA Sports lost interest, but nothing really jumps out as a good game.

Rugby World Cup 2011 was a scaled-down port of Rugby 08's engine, only with fewer features.

Rugby 15 and Rugby World Cup 2015 were bare-bone titles with forgettable game-play and even less in the way of replay-ability.

The Rugby Challenge series was just a bizarre run of games, starting out with promise before ending up with recycled, bug-laden games as the copy-and-pasted game engine bounced around developers and publishers.

The one positive from them, though, is the career mode - archaic in terms of modern sports games, but at least resembling a traditional career mode - and the ability to edit and create players.

We'll circle back to them later.

Which brings us onto Rugby 22, the third in the series of games developed by EKO Software and published by Nacon and BigBen Interactive.

The first, Rugby 18, was a bit of a mess. Rugby 20 was a more refined title, with plenty of promise.

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