Axis Football 2026 is the first new Axis Football game to be released since its development switched to a 2-year development cycle. The extra development time means that I have slightly higher expectations for the game (especially after the previous, 2024 edition, ended up being a bit underwhelming). However, I am still going into this game with the tempered expectations of a low-budget indie game, and the satisfaction that it's a budget $20 title. This means that even if this release is bad, it can only be a quarter as disappointing as any annual release of Madden that costs 4 times as much.

I also put off playing this game until the end of December, even though I bought it on its Steam release date. I kept meaning to start playing it, but my gaming time has been very limited the last few months due to real life circumstances. I was so engrossed in Cities Skylines 2's first major expansion that I kept putting Axis Football off another week. Honestly, I wasn't in much of a hurry to jump into Axis. I was kind of still getting my football video game fix from this year's Madden, since I actually do kind of like the new weekly strategy feature in Franchise that uses coach abilities -- especially once the run blocking issues were patched and fixed (in, like, November!).

The 2-year development cycle also means that I didn't feel as much pressure to play and review this game as quickly as I normally do. I hope the developers at Axis, and anyone who might have been waiting for my review, can forgive me for the tardiness.

Mad scientist

Let's jump right in by talking about the biggest and potentially most innovative new feature of this year's game: the play editor. The previous version of Axis introduced a playbook editor, and this game lets users fill any gaps in those playbooks by creating your own custom plays. This works about how you would expect and doesn't really do anything particularly innovative. In my experience, the play creator is defined more by what it can't do, rather than by what it can do.

A new play creator can be used to fill-in under-developed formations or playbooks.

Your play designs are limited to only the play concepts that exist within the game (including the newly-added Run-Pass-Option (RPO) plays). Concepts like Read Option and Triple Option are still absent in the default playbooks, and you cannot create pure option plays in the play editor. You are also limited to the formations that are present in the game, so you cannot create your own custom formation. So if you were hoping to be able to mod in a college football league and play as a service academy running a Flexbone Triple Option playbook, then I'm sorry, you'll have to wait at least another 2 years. I also couldn't create a proper 3-2-6 defense.

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.

One of my pet peeves with sports games is that they like to make the game sound newer and more advanced than it actually is by putting next year in the title. The Madden that releases in 2022, and which is based on the 2022 NFL season, isn't called Madden 2022; no, it's called Madden 23! Same goes with other big-budget sports games, with the sole exception possibly being video games based off the Olympics (do those even get made anymore?).

One of the things that I liked about the slate of indie football games (Maximum Football and Axis Football) is that they used the current year in the title. There was no confusion or misunderstanding when saying "the 2021 version of Axis Football" -- it's called Axis Football 2021, and it was released in the fall of 2021. But if I say "the 2021 version of Madden", you might wonder if I mean Madden 22, which released in 2021; or Madden 21, which has "2021" in the title, but which actually released in 2020 and is based off the 2020 NFL season.

Well now Axis Football has adopted the same numbering scheme as its big-budget cousin, and they have skipped Axis Football 2022 in favor of releasing Axis Football 2023 in the 2022 calendar year. Sigh... I'm not sure what Axis Games' reasoning for this is. Maybe they felt pressured to adopt the same numbering convention as the big-budget sports games. Perhaps the more sensical numbering scheme was actually confusing people: "Why is there a Madden 22, but no Axis 22 yet?" Whatever the reason, there is no Axis Football 2022, and we instead are going straight to Axis Football 2023.

The leap I've been waiting for!

But my disappointment with Axis Football 2023 basically starts and ends with its title. This is probably the biggest single-year jump in gameplay quality that I have seen from this series since I started playing Axis Football way back in 2018. Axis Football 2023 looks and feels much more polished than in previous years thanks to the developers finally addressing the lackluster catching and pass defense animations that made throwing the ball in previous years feel like such a crap shoot.

Receivers and DBs play the ball more realistically.

The new animations make pass catching and pass defense so much more readable. I can actually understand why a particular pass is caught, incomplete, or intercepted because the ball doesn't just hit the receiver's body and either stick to it or fall to the ground. I see receivers leaping to catch overthrown passes. I see them reach down to try to catch underthrown passes. I see defenders putting an arm out to swat the pass.

It's much clearer why passes are complete or not.

On top of that, the receivers actually have momentum when they perform their catching animations, and that momentum will affect how quickly they can turn upfield -- if they can turn upfield at all. The momentum on catching animations serves to limit the amount of run-after-catch yards that lead to inflated passing stats and scores in previous versions of Axis Football. Now, if a receiver has to come back towards the line of scrimmage to catch a pass, he won't be able to instantly pivot back upfield for extra yards as soon as he catches the ball. He'll continue to take a couple steps towards the line of scrimmage before being able to plant or turn and head upfield, which gives pursing defenders a chance to converge and tackle him before he gets going.

Similarly, receivers running horizontally across the field will also have to follow-through on their catch animation and preserve their momentum, which prevents them from immediately turning upfield. Receivers running towards or along the sidelines will also often have their momentum carry them out of bounds, which makes throws to the sideline (such as quick outs or hitting a running back in the flats) feel much less exploitative than in previous years because the receiver will likely be forced out of bounds instead of being able to instantly turn upfield for 10 or 15 yards.

Receivers retain their momentum after catching the ball, limiting yards-after-catch.

Put simply, the passing game actually looks and feels more like real football, and it elevates Axis Football tremendously!

Since Canuck Play shuttered its studio, canceled Maximum Football 21, and sold the Maximum Football IP to Modus Games, the other major simulation indie title, Axis Football, found itself without any major competition in 2021. There are other indie football games on the market, such as Sunday Rivals, but that is a more arcade-style game and isn't a direct competitor to Axis. I own the Steam version, but haven't played much of it yet. The only other real competition for Axis Football is the indie game Legend Bowl.

I've received several requests to play Legend Bowl and create content for it, including a request by the game's creator, himself. Don't worry King Javo, I bought Legend bowl during the Steam Fall Sale, and will be playing it more this holiday season.

In the meantime, Axis Football has been the only indie football game that I've played this year. So I cannot do my usual thing of comparing Axis to Maximum because there isn't a Maximum Football to compare Axis to. I could do a direct comparison between Axis Football 21 and Madden 22's supposedly-upgraded Franchise Mode, but I'm hesitant to directly compare any low-budget indie product to a billion-dollar licensed game from a major publisher. Maybe I'll revisit that topic later, if I get a lot of demand for it. In the meantime, if you're interested in my thoughts on Madden 22's supposedly-improved Franchise Mode, you can check out my video on that topic, or my full review.

So instead of comparing Axis Football to its direct competition, I've decided that I will instead focus on sharing my hopes and expectations for where the game goes from here. With EA releasing its college football game in 2023, and 2k presumably releasing its "non-simulation" game in 2022, Axis Football needs to take big strides in the next year or two in order to remain relevant and competitive.

This wishlist was originally created as a series video essays, which I encourage you to watch. I'm not going to replicate the entire transcript here, but will instead just summarize the content of the videos. I'm also going to re-arrange this written list a little bit so that each item is in the most appropriate category. If you want more discussion, details, and examples, please watch the linked wishlist videos.