Blitz: The League (Xbox)

Blitz: The League contains no franchise mode to speak of. Instead, you get the campaign mode, a 30-plus-game-long storyline telling the story of one team's rise from the dregs of the game's fictional league to its phoenix-esque rise to the top. You begin the mode by creating a team of your own, complete with city name, uniform style, and logo. Then you get to choose a rookie offensive player and a veteran defensive player. These are the two players that will come under the most focus during the storyline. The story itself was apparently penned by some of the writers from ESPN's now-defunct gridiron soap opera Playmakers, and it shows. After a particularly humiliating defeat against Quentin Sands (voiced to perfection by the dirtiest player in the game: Lawrence Taylor) and his New York Nightmare, your team is sent to Division 3. The league in this story is broken up into three divisions, with the top dogs competing in Division 1 and the bargain-basement, Houston Texans-like squads rounding out the bottom of the barrel in Division 3. The game never really explains how this whole thing works, beyond the fact that you need to win the championship in each division to move up.

You'd think that injuring opponents over and over again might get old after a while. However, you'd be wrong.

After the humiliating defeat, team owner Lyman Strang clears house, pulls together an entirely new roster and coaching staff, and makes a bet with the city's mayor that the team will win the Division 1 championship. What's at stake? A lucrative bond issue for the city's voters that would call for the building of a new state-of-the-art stadium for the team. From there, things just get crazy. Sexual escapades with team cheerleaders occur, gambling debts pile up on your veteran player, and more than a few heated rivalries get started against opposing teams. Oh, and everybody swears a lot. A lot.

Each division plays 10 games and a championship game. You basically have to win seven games in each division to get to the championship. That shouldn't be an issue through the first couple of divisions, provided you're smart about how you build your team up. With no free agents to sign or rookies to draft, the only way to improve your squad is through training and illicit substances. You earn cash for said improvements by winning games, delivering big hits, and even gambling on your own games. Once you've got some cash, you can buy equipment and trainer upgrades to build up the stats of your players the good old-fashioned way, or you can give them "supplements" of varying degrees of legality. Some offer mostly harmless boosts to a couple of stats, but some also juice you up to 'roid-rage-like levels. The more dangerous drugs can be useful, but they'll usually also diminish things like a player's field awareness or injury resistance. So start thinking about just how much you really need that strength and speed boost in contrast to the risk of having a top player's spine cracked into a million pieces. Also, you'll want to avoid juicing up a player too far, as random drug tests will rear their ugly heads from time to time.

The storyline is only interspersed periodically into the flow of the action, and at times it comes across as pretty inconsequential. The few scenes you do get, despite a seemingly intentional level of cheesiness, can be quite entertaining. It also becomes a surprisingly addictive experience to build up your team as you do, especially since you can take your team in to the quick play and online modes. And multiplayer is where Blitz: The League really shines. All the little AI quirks of the offline games go immediately away, and what you're left with is a highly entertaining and often unpredictable multiplayer experience. Online, the games we played on both the Xbox and PlayStation 2 were quite smooth on consumer-grade broadband Internet connections, and getting to use your custom team is just the icing on the cake.

The Blitz games have rarely been known for great visuals, but Blitz: The League delivers well on this front. Mainly it's the animation. The basic movements of the players still have that exaggerated, gangly style to them, but the hits in the game are just ludicrous. Even the basic tackles look like they hurt a whole hell of a lot. And the special moves? They're not for the faint of heart. You'll see these great little moments where some poor receiver gets upended and lands right on his head, or where some recently beaten-up player gets up and spits blood that splatters on the camera lens. These are equal parts painful and hysterical, and you'd be surprised just how many different types of hits there are in the game. The player models also look a cut above anything that's ever been in a Blitz game before. They still don't look especially realistic, and in cutscenes they can sometimes just look bad. But on the field, the action looks excellent. The two versions of Blitz look entirely comparable. The Xbox version is obviously a little cleaner, and the load times on the PS2 are about twice as long as the Xbox version, but apart from those issues, they're about the same. So you're not missing out on anything too significant if you go with the PlayStation 2 version.

Longtime Blitz fans are going to have an absolute field day with this game.

As mentioned before, Blitz: The League is a decidedly foulmouthed game. The characters are cynically written and are gruffly voiced, and they drop an awful lot of "F" bombs. Most of the voice acting is pretty good, though a few characters come off pretty lousily. Apart from those uneven spots, it's good work, and the in-game commentary actually turns out surprisingly well. There's just one play-by-play man, but he delivers the commentary well. In fact, he's probably the least ham-fisted character in the entire game. On the field, everything is as it should be. Hits are booming in nature, bones snap in real raw fashions, and players jaw back and forth with one another using goofy insults that aren't nearly as bad as you might expect. The soundtrack is made up of a number of licensed bands, as is the trend these days. It mostly consists of a bunch of bands and hip-hop acts you've probably never heard of, but most of it is actually surprisingly good, with only a couple of off-kilter tracks here and there.

All told, this is the best that Blitz has been in years. The League reintroduces that classic style of arcade football with an edge that feels wholly appropriate, rather than forced simply for the sake of being edgy. The game also clearly doesn't take itself too seriously, which only adds to the entertainment value. The lack of an NFL license has let Midway effectively go crazy, and by doing so, it's made Blitz relevant again. Whether you're a staunch pigskin purist or arcade all the way, you really owe it to yourself to give Blitz: The League a look. It's easily the best football you'll play all year.

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