Blitz: The League 2
American football is already a tough sport, but Blitz: The League II makes it even tougher and lets you release all the stress on your opponent. Painful, absolutely, and in several aspects.
When Blitz: The League II is started up, you’ll immediately see that the menu looks good. It has its own style and looks a bit like a basketball environment. Also the game has its own style: agressiveness prevails. The best thing to start with is the training. Here you’ll learn what you have to know to play a match. Some information about American football on its own would have been useful, especially when you don’t know the deeper rules of the game. You also learn how to do harder tackles or how to cure them. With a special needle you can recover faster from a fracture. The use of this needle is like a minigame: you have to apply the needle on the right spot.
You’ll notice very quickly that American football is a tough sport during the matches. The hardness of tackles is underlined by showing the bones and muscles and by over-acting the fracture. Sometimes you can perform a late hit after a tackle. With this you can punch your opponent with for instance his helmet. At some moments, blood even splashes on your screen. The only benefit of these late hits is that you take some stamina. After a while, you won’t do this anymore because it’s boring: you only have to press on a button a few times.
The most important part of Blitz: The League II is a kind of career which you have to build up. You are a young talent and get your chance to break through. As you can expect, you have to perform good to get more prestige and be more popular among the fans. Through your career, you’ll see movies of your interviews, conversations with your manager and the other people who surround you. It’s not only about your life in sports, but you will also be able to start for instance relationships. This mode is something different than the usual career, but too bad the matches aren’t equally fun to play.
During the matches, the game is paused a lot because of faults. This is even more frustrating during the training: you have to tackle one specific opponent, but because your teammates already made a fault, the game is paused. This results in a failure of the task and you will have to try again. There are some modes where for instance faults aren’t punished and the game just continues. This is a more pleasant way to play, but on the other hand you will miss the reality. It’s regretful that there is no good balance between punishing or allowing faults.
The graphics of Blitz: The League II are quite good, but not fantastic. The sound is of the same level: average. However, the sound gives you the feeling of a real battle when you want to tackle someone. You hear for instance the players scream when they rush at you.
Blitz: The League II isn’t a poor game, but it could have been a lot better. The graphics and the sound are average and the gameplay is sometimes frustrating. Everything in the game fits its style: matches are hard in American football but those that want more than hard tackles and faults, won’t enjoy them a lot.
6.0