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.

After the disappointment of College Football 26, I wasn't sure if I would care enough to play this year's Madden. If the college game that everyone was excited about and praising last year somehow managed to get worse this year, that didn't bode well for Madden. As usual, I waited a couple weeks and bought it used, then still put off playing it for another week or so. After having to click through multiple advertisements for Ultimate Team and the stupid Season Pass, getting into the actual game didn't make me feel any better.

Just like with College Football 26, my single, biggest problem with Madden 26 (at release) is the inability to run the ball. Just like with the college game, blockers seem incapable of holding blocks, and defensive pursuit is uncanny good. There's like 3 run plays that even seem viable: draws from shotgun, read option keepers, and 01 Trap. With almost every other run play that I call, there is always a defender in the gap. Unless you are able to quickly react to cut back, or you have the stick skills to make a move or break a tackle in the gap, you'll be lucky to average more than a single yard per run.

That's the case for the user, anyway. For the CPU, every inside running play seems to break for 20 yards, and the CPU running back will successfully juke at least 2 defenders every play.

People online are saying that in order to run the ball, you need to utilize the new "Untarget Defender" feature in order to force your blockers to ignore backside defenders in favor of sending an extra blocker to the play-side. There are a few problems with this. First and foremost, as a matter of principle, I should not have to change the blocking assignments every single play in order to get competent blocking!

Running the ball was borderline impossible when the game launched.

Madden also doesn't bother to teach or explain this new "Untarget defender" mechanic. Unless you pay attention to pre-release promotional material, you probably won't know that this option is even available. It isn't documented anywhere, and there's no tutorials for it. I had no idea about it until I went online looking for advice on how to run the ball. Worse yet, this option is located under the "Pass Protection" pre-play menu, which means that a lot of users might not even realize that this feature can be used to modify run blocking assignments.

Almost as important is the fact that, unlike College Football, Madden does not show the actual individual blocking assignments of your blockers on running plays. It does for [most] pass plays, but not for run plays. I have no idea who the offensive line is actually going to try to block, so how am I even supposed to know that I should be modifying the blocking assignments? Or how am I supposed to know that the Untarget Defender command is even working?

The coach cam can show pass blocking assignments,
but not specific run blocking assignments.

If it ain't broke, break it!

Or at least, that was the case when the game released. In mid-September an update was released that seems to have inverted that problem so that running the ball is easy for the user, but the CPU cannot run the ball to save its life. I've had to reduce my Run Blocking sliders down to 20 or below in Franchise just to make CPU run defense competent, while tuning CPU Run Blocking into the 70s or higher just to make it so that the CPU running backs can gain positive yards.

Unfortunately, setting this slider so low leads to recurring problems where my own blockers will cut right in front of my running back right as he hits the hole. This is particularly annoying with receivers or tight ends who go in motion across the formation, away from the run, only to U-turn as soon as the ball is snapped and run through the hole as if to lead block. Despite there being a huge hole, my running back runs right into the back of one of my own players, has all his momentum stopped, and gets dragged down by a backside defender. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens frequently enough to really get on my nerves.

Maybe I would be able to fix some of these problems if the game would only let me see who each of my blockers is supposed to block on running plays. Then, maybe I could use the "Untarget Defender" function to force my pullers to block someone else, so that they don't get in my running back's way. But I can't do that because I have no idea who each of my blockers is actually supposed to block!

It would be really nice if publishers would stop being so reliant on post-release updates, and would actually put some QA effort into their games before they launch. That way, I wouldn't keep feeling like I have to write 2 fucking reviews for every one of these damn things!

This is a follow-up to the previous topic, in which I talked about gameplanning, and Madden's general failure to simulate the process of gameplanning for an opponent. This time, I will be talking more about the procedural element of preparing for the next opponent, which is the various practice and preparatory tasks that coaches and players perform in the week leading up to a match. Weekly practice is something that Madden also currently fails to simulate. But it's also something that Madden (and other football games from other developers) has made multiple attempts at emulating in the past. Some of the previous solutions that EA came up with are, in my opinion, much better than what is available now.

Skill Trainer was good practice!

I will begin by actually ranting about something that I like in modern-ish Madden!

Up until a few years ago, Madden's Franchise Mode allowed the user to play Skill Trainer drills for offense and defense as your weekly practice. In general, I love the Skill Trainer in Madden! I genuinely think that it is one of the best features that has ever been included in any sports video game ever. In addition to acting as a series of gameplay tutorials, the Skill Trainer also makes an effort to teach some basic football concepts and strategies to gamers. The Skill Trainer teaches users things ranging from how blocking schemes work, to how to read the conflict defender on option plays, to how to read different route combinations against different defenses. And it also teaches some defensive concepts such as how to play as a force or cutback contain defender, and which defensive coverages are designed to stop which route combinations, and much more!

The fact that EA used to incorporate these tutorials into Franchise Mode was especially genius. Each week, you could choose one offensive and 1 defensive Skill Trainer drill to run. Depending on how well you performed in the drills, your team would get scaled ratings boost whenever you call the relevant plays in the upcoming match. This allows the player to take the role of a coach and choose specific concepts to practice and focus on in a given week, depending on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team. If that sounds a heck of a lot like how I described actual NFL gameplanning in the previous installment, then yeah! That's kind of the point! Madden used to do this, and do it fairly well, but it doesn't any more.

Skill Trainer drills used to be part of Franchise's Weekly Training feature.

A few years ago, EA changed the Weekly Training feature in Franchise and removed the Skill Trainer. Now you choose very broad, vague concepts to practice, such as "defend inside run", or "throw the ball deep", instead of more specific concepts based on an individual team's scheme. Ironically, this new Weekly Training menu gives a more detailed scouting report of opponent tendencies, that would have worked better with the old training mode using the Skill Trainer. It actually shows which concepts the opponent runs most in different situations, which would have helped the user choose which Skill Trainer drills to run. Now, we have this extra information, but no Skill Trainer drills; and the more vague practice categories don't relate directly to the tendencies listed in the new scouting report.

But before I get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that EA has actually partially addressed some of the issues that I've discussed in a previous installment of this essay series. Specifically, Madden 24, Madden 25, and College Football 25 have substantially improved player logic in loose-ball situations. Since I published the 5th essay, about loose-ball situations, EA has added a number of new animations of players diving or falling onto fumbled footballs. This has mitigated some of the frustrations that I expressed in that essay. Scooping-and-scoring does not happen nearly as often, and players are now also able to recover their own fumbles.

There are still problems with fumbles and loose ball logic, so I won't be rescinding the entire essay. Many of the criticisms are still valid. Most notably, fumble recovery animations often appear pre-determined and break the laws of physics and human anatomy. Awareness during loose-ball situations is also still hit-or-miss.

Nevertheless, EA did actually improve this area of the game, and I want to acknowledge that. As I've said before, I don't make this content simply to shit all over Madden and EA for the sake of it. I make this content because I love football, I love football video games, and I want EA to give us a better product. All my criticism is intended as constructive criticism that I hope is taken in good faith by anyone who watches. As such, I always want to give credit where credit is due.

In any case, I previously started talking about off-field strategy and team-building. Now, I want to talk more about what to do with that talent once they have been scouted, drafted, and evaluated. Today I'll be talking about another one of Franchise Mode's most glaring high-level flaws. It's finally time to talk about how Madden handles (or fails to handle) gameplanning and preparation.

At a very high level, Madden focuses its game strategy almost exclusively on what you like to do! Not off of what the opponent likes to do, nor even off of what you team is built to do. This is not really representative of how real NFL teams prepare for games. In real football, teams do not generally take their entire playbook into any given game. They install, tweak, and practice a different subsets of specific plays each week, based on what they think will work best about their upcoming opponent.

However, modifying your playbook for a given opponent has just never been a part of Madden. This is especially frustrating, because the game has a mechanism for doing this. There is a Custom Playbook and Gameplanning editor that was introduced in Madden 11, and which is still in the game after all these years. While Madden games from over a decade ago did encourage users to use this feature to customize your play-calling to your personal preferences, newer games have pushed this feature more and more into the background, in favor of EA pushing updates to the pre-set playbooks, based on the play calls from real-life teams as the real-life NFL season progresses.

This seems good on paper. Why wouldn't we want realistic playbooks based on the plays that real coaches are calling this season? Don't we want those plays and play-calling frequencies to change to more closely reflect how those coaches call plays in real life? After all, that more closely reflects how the real NFL season is unfolding, right? Sure. Those are great things for Play Now pick-up games and Ultimate Team matchups against randos. But it's not exactly ideal for playing in a simulation Franchise Mode, in which the user is ostensibly taking on the role of a head coach or general manager over the course of multiple seasons, and in which coaching decisions should be based on the events and situations within the Franchise Mode, and not on how things are happening in real-life. And that is where Madden's Franchise Mode falters.

Madden 11 introduced a gameplan editor along with its playbook editor 15 years ago.

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.