I stumbled across the game by accident while looking if there was something new for my Mac in the world of American Football. Looking at the screens it reminded me of a game I played for a while on my Amiga in the early 1990s and it turned out that the developer had started working on his old game and implement new features in the game. If you are looking for joypad waggling action with spinning, jumping, power moves etc, you are wrong here. The game lets you play an Exhibtion game, a Single season and for me the pineapple of things in career mode, where you take your team literally through the ages.
Since the game has no official licence, it does come with custom teams that you can edit as you please. BTW, customization is written with a big letter as you can set up your league in almost any form I can imagine, be it a 8, 12, 32 or even larger leagues. In addition, the game has a very active MOD community which of course lets you play with 2020 NFL rosters. But not only that, there is the great NFL teams from past decades or from leagues many of you might have never heard of like WFL, USFL or AAFL. And you can set the rules to your liking. You do not like the new vertime rules? Revert to the old ones then. You do not want touchbacks to go to the 25, here is your chance to set them to your liking.
When you start a game you are in the coaches shoe. You can choose Beginner or Expert level for play selection, and boy Expert mode goes deep. You find yourself designing plays on the fly, send Flanker in motion and keep the TE in for blocking this time..or what shall I do? There is lots of things to choose from. The results of your selection are presented to you in classic 2D pixelated gfx, which look dated there is no denying that, but you will soon find, that they really do their job. I do not know what it is, but the action on the field gets me and I find myself to really care for whats happening on the field. Might be, because the results are pretty realistic, maybe one of the games that are closest in the results of the plays to the real world as there are. If you are just interested in results, you can sim the game, week or the whole season as you please. You can also lean back and watch any game you want to. If you are interested in the stats, there is plenty of them and they are kept for all players for all of their career.
For GMs there is still things to be added, which will hopefully happen in the next incarnations of the series. But in career mode you can already built your team via the draft and through a Free Agent draft, which works similar to the college draft, only with veteran players. Thats a really nice variation on reality. You can also design a Franchise player you really do not want to loose. You can trade draft picks or players with the other teams and at the beginning of the season you set the focus on certain aspects that shall be trained in camp.
So, for me one of the best football simulations out there, no matter that gfx and sound are pretty dated. The hope is that in the future the game gets more GM features added, such as Depht Charts, actually more roster juggling to do, free agency a bit expanded
So, the focus is mainly on the coaching aspect with playdesign and outsmarting the opposition. The GM stuff is growing and adding a lot to the fun and will hopefully be expanded even further in the future.