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.
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.
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.
