Axis Football 2024 Reviews

6/10

Before going any further in; this is not modern Madden. It's not going to feel like modern Madden. It feels closer to 2008-2012 Madden roughly. Get that modern Madden expectation out of your head right now and you will enjoy the game a lot more. Now let's get to the review. To be quick: I recommend it. Now more in-depth: The good; the game is fun. The passing and run mechanics take a minute to get accustomed to for sure, but once you do you start to just gel with the game and enjoy. The franchise mode is pretty solid and the team creator is what I'd like to see; in depth with multiple uniform choices/combinations and you can put any city, town, village, etc in for where the team is based. You also can customize the field design a bit too. In Franchise I love being able to add my custom teams and adjusting divisions to fit as I like. Remote play together is amazing. I've been able to let my friends try the game and play against me as well. They've also been able to play as P1 from across the US and make custom teams in my games and stuff so I can add them to my own franchises and play against their creations. A football game against solely the AI can lose it's appeal fast so this provides a much needed boost. The game also offers numerous sliders for penalty calling, game pace, etc that can be adjusted in the middle of a game which is great too. The more simplistic control scheme when the play is live (fewer controls then madden; such as no hit stick, no user initiated hurdles, etc) opens this up to all skill levels and can be learned pretty well within 2-3 games. The options pre-snap are also pretty nice. You can move offensive players to specific field locations, call hot routes, assign WRs to block, etc. On defense you can move your DLs, DBs, LBs in different ways; bring them up on the line, drop them back/scatter, shift them left/right (and you can repeat it to keep moving them over if you so wish). And the nice part is that the game clock and play clock will pause while you do this (either in solo or in Player VS Player). Some may not like it, but for me it gives me a second to make the adjustment as I wish and not be rushed navigating into the small options list. HOWEVER; one note is that if the defense makes adjustments (like dropping the DBs back and shifting the LB's left) and then the offense calls an audible, 9 times out of 10 your defense will snap back to their original play locations and undo your adjustments. If you aren't fast either the offense will snap the ball and prevent you from making additional changes. Not a game ruiner, just annoying at times. Some of the stadiums look bland, but there are some that honestly make you go "oh wow, I'm surprised they managed to make that/fit that in a game this size". The bad; the game has it's some glitches, poor animations, and some areas needs improvement. When zooming out to see the play art sometimes the camera gets stuck in "sky mode" as I call it. On punts the ball has odd physics where it will land and then roll... and roll... and roll... I've had punts land at about the 10 yard line and manage to bounce 3-4 yards and roll 6 more into the end zone and keep going. Most often players aren't fast enough to reach the ball to down it prior. The tackling isn't a button press option to tackle or dive on defense, you just get close enough and an animation takes over. In a sense it's like the players have magnets in them that suck them to the ball carrier within X feet/yards on the ball carrier (players can still break tackles though and you as the ball carrier have spin and strafing options). The current lack of a replay camera can be annoying, but its a smaller issue in the grand scheme. Some play calls will lock your QB in an animation (like a fake hand off) and you cannot get out of them; so bad O-Line means you're probably taking the sack. The run game can be annoying at times. The quality of your O-Line will matter a lot, but I have had numerous instances of the offense just not picking up their assigned guy or not moving on the line (almost like they're frozen or glitched) and the defense bulls past and you end up -4 yards. The running backs can be slow too so even if you start to reach the edge, you might have a guy tail you and then magnetically tackle you and prevent an additional 1-2 yards you could have gotten. But if you go into create a player and bump the running backs speed you can become an untouchable speed demon (**this isn't a negative, it just fit to mention it here**). Also some of "dropped" passes can be laughable like a guy is in the wide open with no one to interfere and it bounces off his hands; bad enough that in the real-world he'd be benched for the rest of the game, and you'll probably get like 4 of these passes a game (same goes for interceptions, what would be an easy interception will be dropped like 7 out of 10 times). Some of this is due to player quality (catch rating), but even that can't excuse every single instance. Lastly the game "feels" like it will abuse the penalty system to keep it close. Any time I have a big stop or big game I have a good chance of it being called back on some penalty I couldn't see or just doesn't seem like it happened. I get that there is probably something running under the hood handling this (and I did turn the penalties down a bit from default), but still irks me. Finally; there is no challenge system. No challenging play results, ball spot, catch/no catch, etc. Certainly feels like one of the bigger pieces to be missing from the game. Can I run it though? YES. The game is small and will run on anything. If you have a friend or cousin or kid or whoever that loves football, but maybe doesn't have a modern console or PC and can't play Madden or just is low on cash for instance then this is the best option. For reference I love tech and testing old hardware. This game ran (on max low settings) with about 14-20 FPS on a GTX 1060 3gb, 4gb of DDR2 667, a cheap SSD, and a Pentium 4 SL7QB CPU at 3.2 ghz (1 physical core, 2 threads). That CPU scores on average a 45 on Cinebench R15 and is over 20 years old. So trust me when I say you can play this on practically anything and it won't be CPU bound, you'll be purely graphically bound if at all. To wrap up; I know it looks like a lot of "bad" in the game, but these items are not nearly as annoying as they come across in writing. I put them on here because I believe in providing as much of a big picture overview as I can. In short I recommend the game. It's fun and it's not going to break the bank. Yes it has it's problems, but if you go into this remembering it won't be like modern Madden then those issues weigh/mean far less.

Solid game, few glitches but inside track is developers are very proactive with their playerbase. They've demonstrated that they listen and adapt to improve the game. The game is well worth the money when its on sale. It's pricey at its regular price but still far cheaper than the Madden series... For its regular price I give the game a 6/10. I'd give it a 7.5/10 if you get it on sale.