Blitz: The League II

"Who said you need the NFL to make a great football game?"

The League. A generic name, with anything but generic contents. The League's ranks consist of criminals. Felons. Miscreants. Family men. Nice guys. And a priest. It is corrupt. It is commendable. It is condemnable. And, in the world of Blitz, it is the nation's pastime, and its pride. Indeed, the imaginary universe in Blitz seems to revolve around the gridiron. The League is given a vast history going all the way back to the 1860's, the infancy of football. It is a history painted with colorful characters, many teams, and several upheavals. In the first Blitz, you played through one of the League's upheavals, and in this Blitz, you play through several more. But those details are to follow. First, down to brass tacks.

Gameplay: 9/10

The gameplay of Blitz II is THIS CLOSE to being absolutely perfect. Teams play true to their strengths, and the game rewards you for playing to yours. The task of 1st and 30, instead of NFL football's 1st and 10, and scant 2 minute quarters, necessitates fast and loose football that doesn't allow for dinking and dunking. You must strike at the jugular of the defense with your offense's best weapons.

However, don't think that just because you have 30 yards to defend means that you can lay back on defense. The AI will come at you with the same if not more intensity than you and you must use dirty hits to neutralise their weapons, and create turnovers quickly to give the ball back to your offense so they can rack up more stats. If you play exceptional defense, not only will you have more opportunities with your own offense, but you can reduce an offense to a pile of smoldering rubble.

Both sides of the ball play to gain Clash. Clash allows you to perform dirty hits on defense, and enter a "bullet time" mode on offense to thread the needle on pass plays, perform impossible catches, and injure defensive players with jukes and stiffarms. Doing this actions with Clash gives you Clash Icons, and when you gain 6 of them you enter "Unleashed" mode, which allows you to perform a devastating move that may inflict serious injury on offense, and either perform an extremely painful tackle or a two-man tackle on defense.

One thing you may notice is that now there are injuries on the defensive side of the ball, a huge addition from the last Blitz, when it was only the poor lil' offensive players (and one notable exception in the last game of Blitz I's campaign mode) that suffered crippling trauma. Now defensive players suffer from all the same injuries that offensive players can, and you can cause these injuries by using clash moves with your players. This evens out the game a little bit and allows you to wreak bloody vengeance upon the safety that put your star wide receiver out to pasture.

Further regarding injuries, the x-ray cutscenes of injuries are replaced by a full 3D model depicting them in all their bone-snapping glory. Some of the injuries (such as RUPTURED SCROTUM) may leave you wincing and wanting to turn off the game and play something a little less violent, like Barbie's Horsie Adventure or something. It's definitely not for the squeamish.

Rubberband AI is still a problem, however not nearly as much as it was in the first Blitz. The AI will still remain true to the offensive style that the team they're playing as runs, and won't forsake their team captain. Because of this, if you continue to play smart you can neutralise the rubberband AI a little bit, but unfortunately no amount of smart play will keep Julius Williams from evading your entire defensive squad, cheerleading unit, and two or three drunken fans on his occasional godly march to the endzone.

Back are late hits, and they have me wondering why players bother to wear helmets because they apparently do nothing at all. You'll punch guys in the face, kick them in the manhood, and rip their helmet off their heads and feed it to them. All this drains the opposing players' stamina and makes them slower and easier to injure.

Graphics: 10/10

Everything is crisp and clean and befitting a current-gen title. The ONLY qualms I have about the graphics are a minor glitch where the front of players' pants will not get dirty in mud bowl games, and the extremely limited amount of player faces. Forgivable is the lack of field degradation on dry gridirons, since a lot of them are already worn (Mexico City and Arizona already practically play on dirt anyway).

Sound: 9/10

Visceral. The only word to describe it. When you hit somebody, you'll hear it in excruciating detail. Hell, even a ruptured scrotum crunches like a crumbling bone. As for the commentators, the almost dead-pan play-by-play commentator is not notable enough to get repetitive because mostly he simply calls the action. Frank Caliendo voices the color guy, and man, he does whoop it up. The Blitz team made the right decision in not having Caliendo's Madden appear in all games so he doesn't wear out quickly. However, he does wear thin occasionally. The Blitz team also ramped up the amount of language used by players in the game, so if you play this in the presence of your parents, be prepared for tongue clucking and lectures on proper use of naughty words.

Campaign Mode: 10/10

Campaign mode is back, and now it focuses on the Franchise (you), the first two-way player the League has seen since it ended the practice of Ironman football (the clarification is not actually said in game, and it must be noted that Franchise's agent seems to forget that Ironman football existed at one point in League history). The corrupt Commissioner of the League tries to force Franchise to play for his pet team, the Los Angeles Riot (who lose the game in the opening sequence, but that doesn't seem to faze Commish at all), however the Franchise is bigger than the game of football, being able to go pro in more than half a dozen sports, and since the League needs Franchise more than he needs them, the Commish acquiesces to Franchise's request that he play for his hometown team, which is the original team that YOU will create.

You have the option to have Franchise be a QB, RB, WR, or TE on offense, and a DE, LB, CB, or S on defense. No position is tied to another. You can have a QB/S, a RB/DE, or a TE/LB. Whichever one your heart desires. Of course, each of Franchise's positions influences his stats overall (a RB/DE is going to be much slower at the outset than a RB/CB, however the RB/DE will be stronger and break more tackles). The team creation process is simplified this time around by only having 20 or so helmet/shirt/pants/socks designs, counteracted by you being able to specifically select whether or not the main color of each is your team's primary, secondary, or tertiary colors, or black or white (it must be noted that if your team's colors include black or white, selecting the generic black or white option will result in a different stripe color configuration than selecting your team's black or white option).

As for the campaign mode overall itself, it is much changed from the original Blitz for the better. Instead of 3 week training programs, players improve weekly and only train on one statistic at a time (Franchise can train on two, one on offense and one on defense), and it is MUCH easier to earn money and buy upgrades for your training facilities this time around, which in turn makes it so much easier to improve your team to 6/6 in all three categories, whereas in the original Blitz it was almost impossible.

Juicing is now also only a weekly thing and has in-game benefits that do not affect your statistics (barring a couple of stat-enhancing drugs that are specifically stated in-game). Drugs have such effects as making your players more resistant to injury, draining their turbo bar slower, or allowing them to move in and out of clash mode faster. No more stamina drains on your players either, and the player cleanliness statistic is replaced by Team Risk, where if you use too much illegal supplements your team will get caught and fined by the League.

Overall: 9/10

This game scores a very high value of 9 from me, only a couple of things keeping it back from being a 10/10. First, I would like option of continuing Campaign mode past the story, maybe continue to play Division 1 seasons afterwards, but I can see where Midway decided not to do this to keep perfect teams from cropping up online. Second, I do wish there were an option to edit Franchise past his number and choice of attire. Not all of us are big burly black guys, you know. Even just an option to change his face AFTER campaign mode would have been nice. Third, I wish it were much easier to gain clash on the defensive side of the ball. For goodness sake, if the offense uses an Unleashed move, they gain an entire bar of clash, but if the defense uses one (except if they do a two-man tackle) they lose their entire clash bar. It seems that you play offense to gain clash, and defense to use it. It's a little unbalanced.

However, I do highly recommend you buy this game. It might fly under the radar a little bit but if you're tired of the sterile crap that EA regularly spouts of out of certain orifices then you will most certainly enjoy this gladiatorial combat.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/24/08

Game Release: Blitz: The League II (US, 10/13/08)