This is about the time of year when I would be working on a review of the new Axis Football video game. But that won't be happening this year. Fans of the indie Axis Football video game series will have to wait another year to get their hands on a new release of the game. Earlier this year, the development studio, Axis Games, announced (via the company developer blog) that they will be moving the game to a bi-annual release schedule. That means a new edition of Axis Football will only be released once every 2 years, instead of every year. As such, there will not be an Axis Football 25, and the next game will be Axis Football 26, which will presumably launch sometime in fall of 2025.

This is bittersweet news. On the one hand, I usually have a good time playing Axis Football each year, and am disappointed that I won't have a new version to play this year.

On the other hand, the new schedule will supposedly give the development studio more time to make more substantive updates for each new release of the game. The rate at which the game was improving has been slowing down the past few years, and a lot more of the features have felt incomplete or un-polished. We also weren't really getting broad updates each year. New features and upgrades were becoming increasingly narrow and focused on a few distinct areas of gameplay. In any given year, we would get either Franchise updates, or gameplay updates, but rarely both.

For example, last year's game include a new playbook editor, but the game lacks the variety of plays and schemes that really make a custom playbook worthwhile.

Axis Football 23 was actually one of the best single-year upgrades for the series, owing largely to dramatic improvements in catch and pass defense animations, and an innovative player-in-motion system. But as good as that release was, it didn't have any new Franchise features. Well, at least not any explicit Franchise features. The other gameplay features, such as a new fatigue system, did have knock-on effects that indirectly improved the Franchise experience.

In any case, this new release schedule will hopefully mean that Axis Games can include substantial gameplay upgrades, and also Franchise updates, and also maybe new features, all in a single new release. Instead of having to spend time supporting an updated a new release every year, and also trying to port the game to consoles and phones, Axis can spend that time working on more features and updates. Hopefully, the result of all of this will be that Axis Football 26 will be the best release of the game so far!

Axis Games is releasing developer blogs about new features of the next game.

Unfortunately, Axis Games is still a very small indie studio. In fact, lead designer Danny Jugan might be the only full-time employee. I know they used to have some part-time developers, but I'm not sure how much (if any work) those individuals still do on the game. So they are still going to be limited in what they can do, and we can't expect a quantum leap in one new release.

I criticized Deliver Us The Moon for its depiction of a near-future environmental apocalypse. These sorts of apocalyptic depictions of climate change can cause people to take the real-life threat less seriously, since it's slower and less dramatic than the fictional depictions that people see. I tried to give Deliver Us The Moon the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that the developers were maybe going for more of a "overpopulation and depletion of resources" kind of apocalypse, and less of a "anthropogenic climate change due to greenhouse emmissions" apocalypse. However, Deliver Us Mars makes more explicit reference to greenhouse gasses and climate change, so I feel like my earlier criticism is a bit vindicated.

That being said, flashbacks show an Earth that is very much still alive, as opposed to the previous game, which made the Earth look like a barren wasteland. Flashbacks show the character and her family hiking through forests and diving among coral, while talking to each other about how much of a shame it is that the forests and coral are dying off and probably won't exist for very long. As the game goes on, we see extreme weather events, and examples of the damage they can cause and the danger they represent. Deliver Us Mars also highlights some of the socio-economic complications of overpopulation, with clear divides between "haves" and "have-nots".

Overall, I like this depiction of environmental collapse a lot better than in the previous game. It's a much more nuanced and (importantly) accurate depiction of the near future of climate change, and it shows the personal and individual cost of climate change at small scales, rather than making it an apocalyptic, planet-destroying event. It's still blunt and heavy-handed in its delivery, but it's far less exaggerated this time around.

The depiction of climate change is much more accurate and nuanced this time around.

Martian sight-seeing

Deliver Us The Moon felt like it peaked early, with a lot of the first-person, zero-G set pieces. After landing on the moon, so much of the rest of the game was just walking around sterile space station interiors. There was like 1 or 2 short sequences driving a rover on the lunar surface, but that was it. The player hardly got to explore the lunar surface at all.

Deliver Us Mars follows a similar progression path. It starts with zero-G segments on the rocket approaching Mars and a space station in orbit of Mars, before crash-landing on Mars. Then the rest of the game is walking around Mars. Despite this similar progression path, Deliver Us Mars is far less monotonous than its predecessor, as it varies the scenery and gameplay a lot more. There's frequent flashbacks to the protagonist's childhood, in which she hikes, climbs, and scuba-dives with her family in playable vignettes. These sequences are very much on-rails, and don't give the player hardly any freedom of exploration, but they are a welcome break from sterile, claustrophobic white walls.

The player spends more time walking and driving on the Martian surface, instead of claustrophobic space stations.

More importantly, there's a much larger focus on exploring the Martian surface. This takes the form of rover trips between levels, and some outdoor levels that require the player to climb and platform across Martian cliffs and canyons.

I felt like College Football 25 would be a real make-or-break title for EA Sports. Madden has been getting criticized for its focus on Ultimate Team, lack of attention to Franchise Mode, and myriad legacy issues that EA just refuse to address. The market has been jonesing for a licensed college football game -- in fact, it's been jonesing for any alternative to Madden. This is EA's chance to really put out a quality product that can earn it a lot of good faith to help carry it through the coming years of renewed football video game competition. I honestly expected that College Football 25 would hit a home run with its Dynasty Mode and feature set in order to earn back that trust and good faith -- especially after it was delayed a whole year from its original expected release.

Instead, I keep feeling disappointed and frustrated with College Football 25 at almost every turn. It feels, to me, like a pale shadow of its NCAA Football forebears. It's a mess of missing features, confounding control and interface issues, bad A.I. (especially on defense), and rosters that are muddled and obfuscated by the legal tightrope of name-and-likeness rights. It checks off almost all of the "must have" feature boxes (like adding the playoff and transfer portal), but this game seems to aggressively refuse to go above and beyond in any capacity.

Strap in and get comfortable. This is going to be a long review...

No-huddle gameplan

The launch version of College Football 25 is really friggin' hard! I started 0 for 7 against the CPU (on the All-American difficulty, with default sliders). I had to play a Boise State home match against lowly cupcake New Mexico in order to get my first victory. Since then, I've been doing a lot better, but victories do not typically come easily.

I have my share of responsibility in this. I don't know the playbooks yet, and I threw some facepalm-inducing interceptions. Linebackers seem to play a lot deeper in College Football 25 compared to Madden, and my QBs weren't putting enough touch on passes over the middle of the field. So Post and Dig routes that would be wide open in Madden were repeatedly being picked by lurking linebackers.

Lurking linebackers make a lot of interceptions between the hashes.

Despite my own mistakes, the designers of the game seem to have gone out of their way to make sure that the barrier to entry would be as high as it could possibly be. The game doesn't seem to want to teach its new features, mechanics, or controls, and it insists on changing things just for the sake of change -- screw my decade (or longer) of muscle memory! Many problems that have long frustrated me in Madden reared their ugly heads to conspire against me as well. I often felt like I could call out exactly how an upcoming play would unfold before the snap, because I've seen all of this so many times in Madden.

Sacks and interceptions tended to come in pairs or triplets.

My star receivers refused to catch open downfield passes, while the CPU receivers all had hands of glue.

Force defenders refused to do their job, and my defense in general refused to contain the edge or take viable pursuit angles. Even if I expected an outside run and spread my line or linebackers, they'd still all crash inside and get smothered by down-blocks.

CPU receivers would repeatedly beat my DBs on in-breaking routes and break free for huge gains or scores, even though I explicitly set inside shade before the snap.

Outside shade was basically an invitation for the CPU to score on a post or quick slant, even if I had a single-high safety or robber to supposedly stop those specific routes.

My blockers would absolutely refuse to block the single most important assignment on the play whenever I needed a run play to be successful, even with elite running teams (such as Michigan).

My own big plays would consistently be called back by penalties.

The CPU teams would go into un-beatable "turbo mode" as soon as the 2-minute warning hit.

And so on, and so on. You've heard or read all of this before if you've looked at any review of Madden in the past decade or so.

CPU-controlled defenders take horrible containment and pursuit angles.

There was even a patch, released a couple days before this review was published, which was supposed to have improved pursuit angles. But in my limited play since the patch, it seems to have actually made pursuit even worse, somehow! Not only do players continue to take horrible containment angles, but any defender that happens to be in the open field on the perimeter, and in a position to stop an outside run, now has an infuriating habit of just bouncing off the ball-carrier. So perimeter tackles that were being made a week ago, are now being missed after the patch, giving up even more big runs and scores to the outside.

I cannot understate how much these poor pursuit and containment angles are ruining my enjoyment of this game! So many of my losses can be directly traced to my defense just completely shitting the bed and giving up big run after big run because they are completely unwilling to defend the perimeter. And there is little-to-nothing that I can do about this, because I can only control a single player on the defense at a time.

UPDATE 28 August 2024: I was wrong about how the Option controls work.

It turns out that I was mis-understanding how the Option controls work in this game. It's actually not nearly as bad as this blog (and its accompanying video) make it out to be. I will be posting a new blog and video in the coming days to address my mistake and explain how the Option actually works, and also the logic behind why I think EA made this change. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

In my previous post about EA Sports College Football 25, I mentioned that there are 4 big challenges that I'm having, which have caused me to loose the vast majority of matches that I've played against the CPU, on the All-American difficulty, with no adjustments to any gameplay or A.I. sliders. 1 of those problems is my fault, which is that I need to get better at reading the defenses and not turning the ball over as much. I'm still working on it... The second issue is that CPU-controlled defenders do not properly play outside containment and take horrible pursuit routes that give up big plays and scores. That's not on me, since I can't personally control all 11 players on the defense, and am dependent on them doing their assigned jobs. The third problem that I've been having is the same problem that everyone else is having, and was the primary topic of the previous post, which is that the kicking meter is too damn hard.

The 4th major issue that I'm having with College Football 25 is the changes to the Option mechanics and controls. Option controls have been changed, such that the user now has to hold the X button (on PlayStation) in order for the QB to keep the ball, or release the button in order to hand off to the fullback or halfback. More importantly, however, is that the timing rules for the option hand-off no longer lines up with the animations, making it difficult or impossible for the user to execute these plays as they are designed.