Anyone who pays attention to video game football knows that EA’s Madden series has been less than stellar to say the least. If you’re reading this review, chances are you’ve grown tired of Madden and are looking for an alternative. That’s where Doug Flutie’s Maximum Football 2020 comes in. Maximum Football 2020 released last Friday on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. This is the fourth iteration of the series which began with Canadian Football 2017. Over the last several years, Maximum Football has evolved into a kind of jack of all trades, allowing league, team, and roster customization previously unseen outside of text sims.

When it comes to evaluating Maximum Football, it’s important to keep in mind that the game is developed by a very small team with limited resources and is sold at a budget price. With that said let’s get into the pros and cons of this year’s version. 

Customization

Maximum Football is an unlicensed football game, meaning that every conference, team, and player included is fictional. This leads to the game’s greatest strength, customization. You can play season or dynasty mode with 9, 10, 27, 32, or 130 teams. You have the option of using US college, US pro, or Canadian rules and you can customize the name, nickname, logo, and roster of every single team in your league. When changing your logo you have the option to pick from a fairly robust catalog of default logos or prior to beginning your dynasty you can enter the logo creation screen and build your logo from scratch. Either way, you’ll have the ability to set up your team exactly the way you want whether that means a truly fictional school or recreating a real college or pro team. Unfortunately this is also tied to one of the biggest drawbacks of Maximum Football, the lack of a roster/file sharing system. The development team has stated the absence is due to a lack of time and money to get the feature implemented, which is understandable, but doesn’t change the fact that it’s an expected feature in modern sports games. 

Dynasty

It’s too much work for one person to recreate college football without the help of others in the community, but you can customize your favorite team and hop into the dynasty mode which is where Maximum Football shines. Here you’ll take the team of your choice and guide them through multiple seasons. You’ll play through the regular season, conference championships, and bowl games (or playoffs if you’re good enough) while navigating in season recruiting to keep the program rolling year to year. Recruiting consists of calling prospects each week and pitching your school. Each pitch, such as staying close to home, program prestige, national TV games etc., has a rating for your school from extremely low to elite and also a rating for how important that thing is to each player. You have 10 hours to recruit each week and every action takes a bit of time from 5 minutes to place the call up to a full hour for scheduling a visit. If you start off at a low level institution the top recruits won’t even take your call, you’ll have to stock up on low ranked players and home grown prospects and start winning some games to grow your university’s appeal. 

It’s not all smooth sailing once you become a powerhouse though, sure you’ll be able to land 4 and 5 star players but you have to make sure your team has depth everywhere as you can lose players to injury or suspension at the drop of a hat. While the game does a nice job with the recruiting aspect, I would like to see a more detailed scouting report for each of the prospects. Right now you’re given pretty basic information: height, weight, speed etc., but I think the game would benefit from adding player type and scheme fit info even if the gameplay doesn’t take advantage of it at this point, you could at least let your imagination fill in the gaps regarding the type of program you’re building. 

Gameplay

Speaking of gameplay, that’s where things turn sour for Maximum Football 2020. The game just isn’t ready for prime time on the field. Very rough graphics, poor collision detection, laggy controls, no stiff arm, missing animations, no commentary, and annoying to navigate playbooks all add up to a game that’s just not very fun right now. Player models need a lot of work, they seem disproportionate and it’s off-putting to look at them. The poor collision detection means players move right through each other and it makes it difficult to tackle or know when you have time to throw. Throwing the ball is all over the place. There’s sometimes a delay between the button press and your QB attempting a pass, even highly rated quarterbacks are strangely weak armed, unable to throw the ball even 50 yards, bullet passes are ineffective as they’re either off target or the receiver will unnecessarily break off their route so the ball sails past them. Running the ball is a coin flip, either your line will block and you’ll nearly 10 yards or there will be a defender in the backfield tackling you as soon as you get the handoff. So I’ve learned to leave the run game alone.

Defense is in a word, dull. If the control options on offense are limited, on defense they’re nonexistent. The lack of animations led to several missed pick six opportunities. I would break on a pass, press Y to attempt an interception only to have my defender stop on a dime and jump straight up in the air rather than continue running into the path of the pass. Not only is the tackle button slow to respond, the animation takes forever as well and at times will play out in whatever direction it chooses. It’s exceedingly rare for a football to make playing defense fun, but here I was begging for the option to sim until I was back on offense.

One thing that livens up the gameplay a bit is the play creator. I had more fun than I thought I would coming up with play designs and trying them out in actual games and the development team should be commended for going the extra mile providing this level of customization. One area I wish got that same level of attention is presentation. I already mentioned the lack of commentary but this extends to every part of the game. When you boot up Maximum Football you get some college band music with the main menu, however once you get beyond that first screen there’s no music, some slow transitions between screens and in general some difficult to navigate menus. Adding some music and a more user friendly interface would go a long long way towards improving the player experience. 

Conclusion

In the end I think the main problem with Maximum Football 2020 is one of scale. Put simply, the developer is currently not equipped to produce an 11 on 11 simulation football game with a deep dynasty mode that has presentation/graphics on par with other modern releases. I think this series would be better served by picking one area of the game and focusing on making that best in class rather than trying to deliver on all fronts. If you’re really into customizing teams or creating your own playbook and are okay with simming most of the games then there’s some fun to be had here. However even at $30, the gameplay isn’t good enough for me to recommend a purchase for anyone other than those who just want to support the dream of competition in the football gaming space.