Being a fan of AFL video games is a lot like supporting North Melbourne. You convince yourself that things are about to turn around. You latch on to bright spots and get excited about experienced talent returning to steer the ship. But in the end, you often have a miserable experience as you force yourself through each game. Thankfully, AFL 26 bucks this trend with solid gameplay bolstered by a variety of game modes, however there remains many areas for improvement.
Holding The Ball
AFL 23 had a notoriously bad launch. What followed over the next couple of years were frequent patches that fixed bugs, reworked gameplay and added content. The end result was passable, if unspectacular, but it left developer Big Ant Studios with a solid foundation to build from. I was expecting AFL 26 to be an incremental upgrade, but they took bigger swings that create a more engaging experience overall.
Player movement around the ground feels slower and more deliberate. It doesn’t perfectly replicate the real sport, but adapts it to be a more fulfilling video game. After all, struggling through a flurry of chaotic kicks, handballs and tackle just for the sake of realism isn’t fun. Stamina has a way bigger impact on the game. As your players tire out, they sluggishly move around the field making interchange decisions more crucial.
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The set shot system has been adjusted with a rewarding push-pull between power and accuracy. Marking has also been improved to give greater visual feedback to the player regarding successful timing and positioning. There’s also a jostling system, but it can only be performed when the players are positioned in a specific way. Given the need to make quick, precise decisions, I’d instead fumble my controller trying to hurriedly hit the right button, so I’d prefer a greater flexibility to this mechanic.
The biggest letdown are the computer-controlled players. Your teammates often look lost as they wander the field. Taking an intercept mark feels great. Then you watch your players slooowly make their way into defence. Once they realise you have the ball, they slooooowly retreat back to your half and by this point, you need to play on. Your opponents also make questionable decisions on all difficulty levels. Multiple times, a CPU opponent taking a set shot after the siren has performed a pointless chip kick to a teammate. Hopefully, future updates boost the intelligence of the NPC players.
These issues crop up less in multiplayer, and AFL 26 is a great competitive romp. Online play has been pretty stable when I’ve matched with someone. That being said, I have spent multiple 10+ minute sessions waiting to connect with anybody to no avail. There’s a few different online modes and I have my concerns this game doesn’t have the player base to support this.
If there are particular mechanics you don’t enjoy or struggle with, you can tweak a wide array of settings. Just be aware that these custom setups won’t extend to online play or Pro Team, so don’t get too comfortable. There’s also a pretty comprehensive range of tutorials to help you improve your skills.
Anger Management
I’ve spent the majority of my time in the Management Career mode, attempting to drag my beloved West Coast Eagles out of their real-world doldrums. This mode has been extensively fleshed out with options to control memberships, travel arrangements and training schedules. It’s hard to tell how these choices impact your season and I wish that cause and effect was more obvious. But hey, it gives you plenty of entertaining distractions.
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Your career has more structure and purpose with season-long objectives, as well as random ones for each match. While this is a great idea in theory, some of the per-match objectives are simply a mess. Why should I aspire to kick 8 behinds in a match? Where’s the fun in that?
Injuries are now more present in the game, but they take the form of a random text pop-up. There’s no matching cutscene and it often feels like a behind-the-scenes dice roll gone wrong instead of something contextual to the game. It all just lacks a bit of theatre. And speaking of a lack of theatre, awards continue to just be a wall of text at season’s end. Jake Waterman took home the Coleman Medal for me and it felt like the game hardly acknowledged it.
There’s a lot of clunkiness in the menus. The lineup selection screen locks you out of important information and requires way too much button-pressing to make simple moves. You can leave it to your support staff to pick, but then you can’t adjust their choices. Trading and contract extensions are equally unintuitive, obfuscating details like age and morale. In fact, the whole trading system could use a re-think. There’s no punishment to just spamming trades requests over and over until you get the player you want. While a greater risk-reward element would be more engaging, my superstar Eagles lineup of Nick Daicos, Tom De Koning and The Bont is fun in its own way.
This may all sound rather negative, but it’s largely because the bones of the mode are completely adequate. Nailing these extra elements would just help keep me hooked in and hopefully this will get upgraded with time.
Rising Star
Entirely new to AFL 26 is the Player Career mode. You can create an AFL or AFLW player and lead them to personal glory. After a pretty lacklustre under 18s campaign, where I didn’t rank anywhere in the end of season best and fairest, Adelaide still took me as the number one draft pick. I now wonder if it’s possible to rank anywhere else.
I have to admit something — these types of modes generally do nothing for me. And while I personally can’t get into the Player Career offering in AFL 26, that isn’t to say it’s bad. You can choose to control the whole team or just your player, as well as whether you want the camera to follow the ball or your position. Though, tracking the camera on your player makes it difficult to know what’s going on in the rest of the match.
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The game doesn’t really give you clear instructions on your role or tactics within the team. And while it’s cool that you can play in state leagues as you fight to get on to an AFL list, I often felt disconnected from the larger story of my team. If you enjoy these sorts of modes, I think this is an entirely serviceable offering, but it’s not something I see myself spending a lot of time in.
Unpacking Pro Team
Heavily promoted at the launch of AFL 23, Pro Team launched midway into the game’s lifespan. The Ultimate Team-inspired mode sees players opening card packs and engaging in seasonal game events to build the most impressive dream team possible.
The AFL 23 iteration of Pro Team sunk its hooks in to me and this installment feels largely the same. The launch is more sparse on content, but I’m somewhat grateful. It’s definitely less overwhelming for new players to jump in to.
The previous Pro Team mode also had a great deal of bugs, and many of them are present here. You’ll often encounter stray notification bubbles for no reason, duplicate cards and lineups that don’t preserve my selections. It can be irritating for sure, but with a little extra patience, you’ll overcome it.
If you fundamentally oppose these sorts of modes for their money-grabbing nature, this likely won’t change your mind. But I rarely feel like it’s trying to pump money out of me and there’s plenty of content that doesn’t cost a cent.
Off The Mark
Some tweaks to the presentation give AFL 26 a fresh coat of paint. You can see it in pre-game lineup supers, player name graphics after goals and new cutscenes that play during breaks. The problem is that those same cutscenes repeat over and over, so that freshness wear off quickly.
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There’s some diminishing returns when it comes to the overall graphics. AFL 23 impressed me, as the detail of the player scans felt unprecedented for this sport. Jump forward two years and these graphics don’t hit the same. Instead, it draws attention to some of the more unusual representations. Clearly, Andrew McQualter hasn’t been scanned and every time you see the West Coast players gather around for a stirring message from some fresh-faced hairless nobody, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
I’ve had some graphical issues here and there, but nothing on par with the disaster that was AFL 23’s launch. In fact, there’s almost a charm to some of the more peculiar ones, such as Calsher Dear’s disco ball haircut, which happened every time he appeared on-screen.
The audio is a disappointment as usual. Commentary is stale, repetitive and often fails to capture the moment. General match audio is passable, but in some games, the atmospheric noise just gradually grows louder and louder, as though the crowd turned into a horror movie score.
Who Would’ve Thought The Sequel Would Be… Much Better Than The Original?
AFL 26 leans into the greatest strengths of the previous game, creating a more fully-featured, confident offering to fans of the sport. It’s a shame that some of the baggage and bugginess from the previous entry also came along for the ride, but the continued support of AFL 23 leaves me optimistic for the future of this entry.
A lot of this review might have read like negativity and nit-pickiness, but the basic gameplay is actually quite delightful. This bizarre sport is a nightmare to turn into a video game. Yes, you may play AFL 26 and often say, “That’s not how it is in real life!” Ultimately, I don’t really care. Making an enjoyable video game should be the top priority and that’s felt in the core gameplay here.
Upon the release of the last game, I never thought Big Ant Studios could salvage the mess they unleashed upon the public, let alone follow it up with a sequel. This may sound like I’m damning AFL 26 with faint praise, but I honestly think this is the best Australian Rules football I’ve ever played. There’s plenty of areas for improvement that I hope will be given attention soon, but the fundamentals are good. AFL 26 may not be a specky, but it’s a solid uncontested mark that might lead to some exciting plays in the future.
Quest Daily scores AFL 26:
7/10
AFL 26 is now available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One and Steam, with a Switch 2 release releasing in the future.
