The Maximum Football series has been around for about five years, with the prior version featuring Doug Flutie as its title star. Now Maximum Entertainment has returned with an all-new entry – and a launch for the series in early access form alongside it being free-to-play. In June, the game had a beta and it received mixed reviews, with players wanting more polish to the gameplay and overall presentation.
Gridiron Greatness
New to the early access build is a revamped camera, with a more dynamic camera in place and replays featuring camera-to-camera transitions to look more TV-level realistic. Tackle animations look nice and are quite physical and have been made to look more impactful. More detailed animations are also added in for things like passing the ball or tackling a player mid-throw looking more organic.
Power Plays
The goal of replicating the flow of a game has been better-replicated with a redone running game allowing more running lanes than before. Now the games have a faster pace to them and the amount of blocks available to players has been increased in amount and improved in execution. The ball-carrier now has more moves available than before and are more reliable with higher-stat players than before alongside redone animations.
The passing and catching game has been redone, with more realistic animations that are smoother. The NextFest build showed a lot of placeholder content in the uniforms, presentation and animations,which have been improved quite a bit. There are more offense and defense options available and the ball has separate physics, so you could see it bounce off of helmets and players before landing in someone’s hands.
This makes the ball itself look more like the star of the show than in many games and the UI has been overhauled a lot. The menu graphics are large with bold colors and the scene transitions with the Maximum Football League logo are more elaborate. While real players and teams aren’t used, the teams featured do have signature color schemes, and things like the Skywings' bold neon green color scheme allows them to stand out in ways that prior unlicensed pro football games have suffered by going for pure knock-off teams.
You can check out Maximum Football on Steam now. Anyone who has checked out Madden may want to check it out just to enjoy something different. One downside to Madden becoming the dominant series on console is that you don’t have many alternatives on the market, with Backbreaker and Maximum Football being the only things out there since 2K All-Pro Football and before that, NFL 2K and NFL Fever on Xbox.
Anyone who has checked out Madden may want to check it out just to enjoy something different.
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