Blitz: The League Review

Blitz: The League was designed from the ground up to be a slap in the face to the NFL and EA for letting the Madden franchise run away with the exclusive NFL license. It seems to me, then, that if you want to beat Madden you should at least have as good of a football game as Madden. That doesn’t happen in Blitz, and the football game that is hidden underneath all of the profanity, steroids, violence, and dancing cheerleaders is shallow and really isn’t all that fun.

Classic Blitz With A New Attitude

The idea behind Blitz: The League was to create a game where you could do all of the things that the NFL wouldn’t ever allow in a videogame that carried the NFL license. This includes extremely violent no rules football, profanity, steroids, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. What makes all of this appealing is that it really is the seedy underbelly of the real NFL “cough”LakeMinnetonka”cough” that has been hidden from the public eye for the most part. This is an “M” rated game and it is obvious that Midway did everything it could to earn that rating. There are jokes and references all over the place and at first it is all really cool, but after a while you wish the game would just shut up and stop trying to be so clever and let you play football.

Gameplay

It is when the actual football starts, however, that Blitz starts to really fall apart. This is 8 on 8, 30 yards for a first down, no rules football just like the old Blitz games which is a good thing. The problem here is that the game is plagued by bad AI and just plain poor execution as far as the fundamentals are concerned. Passing, rushing, tackling – everything is just really sloppy and not very fun. No part of it is broken, in fact, moving the ball is pretty darn easy, but it isn’t very satisfying because the game moves at a thousand miles an hour and it feels more like you are just along for the ride rather than being able to use any skill or strategy. There is also something called “Clash Mode” where everything around your slows down and you are able to blow right past defenders. As you can imagine, this makes the game ridiculously easy. Couple this with bonehead AI that will fall to the same money plays over and over and over again and you have an experience that gets old pretty quickly once you have seen a couple of the cool little broken bone animations and watched the cheerleaders shake their booties.

Review continued on Page 2 ...