Despite a 2-year development cycle, the previous Axis Football game was one of the worst releases that I've seen from this series since I started playing it in 2017. I tried to start a Franchise Let's Play with Axis 2026, but the game played so poorly that it was hard for me to come up with positive things to talk about. I was optimistic about the 2-year development cycle, but last year's game was so bad that I was actually happy to see Axis Games go back to an annual release, so that I could get a new -- hopefully better -- game to play. When the new game was announced, I immediately ditched that Let's Play and crossed my fingers that Axis Football 2027 would be a significant improvement.

Well, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that Axis Football 2027 does have several great new features that I've been waiting years to see added. The bad news is that most of what bothered me about Axis 26 is still present in Axis 27.

Last year's overly-simplified running controls are still present.

Tackled behind the sticks

First and foremost, the physics and tackling is back to feeling closer to how it felt in Axis Football 2024, which is not saying a lot. Axis 26's game feel was awful! 27's physics and tackles still don't feel great. Catching and pass deflections also feel like they have regressed since their height of Axis 23. I'm not sure if code got reverted, or if new physics logic simply broke the improvements that previous years' games had made, but things still look very rough out there -- even though it looks and feels a lot better than last year's game. Or maybe it's better to say that it feels "less bad".

There's other problems with receiver route running and pass leading that feel like they have regressed. A lot of routes are run way too shallow (or behind the line), and pass leading is highly unreliable and inconsistent. Drag routes are often run 2 or 3 yards deep, and the the passes are underthrown such that, if the pass is caught at all, it's often caught behind the line of scrimmage. Tight End Slide routes don't get upfield at all, and are run 5 yards (or more) behind the line of scrimmage, and are virtually impossible to be converted for positive yards.

Routes like Drags, Slides, Hitches, and Curls are routinely run too shallow and are still underthrown.

Hitch and Curl routes are perhaps the worst offenders though. These routes are also run too shallow, but to make matters worse, the receivers come back too far, and the quarterback leads the throw even further back. A 3-yard hitch might be caught 4 yards in the backfield and might get tackled for a 4, 5, or even 7 yard loss. Even a 10-yard curl might come all the way back to the line of scrimmage, and runs a risk of losing yards if the defense converges before the receiver can turn upfield.

In last night's Thursday Night matchup between the Bears and the Patriots, head coach Ben Johnson drew up and called what might be the weirdest trick play any of us will see in the 2026 NFL season. It's also a thoroughly illegal play.

The play in question happened with 7:50 to go in the 2nd quarter. On a 2nd & 3, Caleb Williams takes the ball from under center, fakes a handoff to De'Andre Swift on an End Around motion, and simultaneously uses his other hand to hand the ball off to Joe Thuney who is pretending to pull. Thuney cradles the ball for a second while the defense pursues Swift, before he spins around and runs up field for 2 yards before being tackled.

The announcer, Al Michaels, immediately calls it a "beautiful" trick play, until the penalty flag comes out, and the referees bring it back 5 yards and lose the down on an "Illegal Forward Handoff" penalty call. Even the referee appears to stumble when signaling and calling the penalty, because I'm sure he has never had to call this particular penalty in his life. It's a penalty that probably hasn't been called in the NFL for a hundred years -- if ever!

Watching the play, it appears that Joe Thuney and Caleb Williams run this play as it was designed and practiced. Thuney does not attempt to pull deeper than Williams, and Williams does not seem to make any attempt to make the handoff a lateral or backwards handoff (which would have made the play legal). So did Coach Johnson put this play in the gameplan and call it, knowing that it is illegal, and just hoping that the refs wouldn't call it? Or did they install this play, and nobody on the Bears' coaching staff knew that it was blatantly against the rules?

Friends and co-workers suggested to me that maybe the coaches used A.I. to come up with the design of the play, but I think this is highly unlikely. They also suggested that Johnson was simply testing the referees to see if they would catch and call this obvious, but rarely (if ever) enforced penalty. If so, then it's very risky to call something like this in that game situation -- up by only 3 in the 2nd quarter. If you were up by, like, 3 scores, or it was the preseason, and you just want to run something silly or experimental to test the refs and the NFL's rules, then that's one thing. Bill Belicheck has been known to do stuff like that, especially in preseason.

Also, I want to point out that De'Andre Swift does a horrible job of selling the End Around. He doesn't pretend to be holding the football at all, so the defense immediately reacts to the fake and turns to pursue Williams and/or Thuney. Also, it's possible that Swift ran his End Around motion too deep, which might be why Williams has to stretch so far for the play fake, and why Thuney ends up in front of Williams. Maybe if Swift had run the Jet motion more shallow, Williams would be able to hand the ball laterally to Thuney, and the play would be legal. Maybe the Bears will try running this again in the future, but with a better fake action. So in the future, Coach Johnson, if you're going to run a trick fake, maybe fake the ball to somebody else who's actually going to put some effort into forcing the defense to bite.

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© Amazon Prime, NFL.

Joe Thuney and Caleb Williams appear to execute the play as it was designed and practiced, which is illegal.

Legal or not, this is exactly the kind of wild play that we all expected when the Bears hired Johnson. It's also exactly the kind of play that really makes the player buy into what a coach is selling. Johnson is trying to do things that the rest of the NFL isn't doing, and he's trying to get everyone involved in it. Designing plays to get touches to offensive lineman will stir up excitement and enthusiasm in the locker room. I hope to see more of it!

If you already read my review of College Football 27, then you know that I was late getting into the mood for football season due to delays in migrating my NFL fantasy football league to the ESPN service. I didn't even start looking to buy a used copy of Madden 27 until a week or 2 into September. I didn't even get around to meaningfully playing Madden until October.

If you read my review of College Football 27, then you also already know that my first impressions of that game were surprisingly positive. The game appeared to have features that I'd wanted for years, and overall seemed (initially) to be a much more polished experience than what I was used to from EA Sports. Madden 27 gave me almost the exact opposite initial impression. Before I'd even gotten to the main menu, Madden 27 was already prompting me to pay money to buy some kind of season pass. That's right, the game was begging me for more money before I had even properly started it!

I don't even bother playing or reviewing Ultimate Team anymore. It's pay-to-win garbage that keeps getting more and more expensive every year.

EA was begging me for more money before I had even loaded into the Main Menu!

Once I skipped past that bullshit, I was immediately bombarded by more technical incompetence and bugs. The title screen featured a cool remix of Madden's soundtrack, and I wanted to see what other music was available. But when I tried demoing the other tracks, the title screen theme continued to play over them, and it was obnoxiously loud.

I could not get the title theme to stop playing. I tried disabling the song in the music menu, I tried going into Settings to change the volume, I tried changing the audio presets, but nothing would work. The menu assaulted my ears with 2 or 3 songs playing on top of each, and I couldn't get them to stop! My only recourse was to quit the game entirely, after which the music worked properly, and I could correctly demo the other tracks in the game. (It's a much more varied and appealing soundtrack than usual, featuring a lot more rock, classic rock, and even some country tracks to go along with the hip hop and rap tracks that I mostly had to disable.)

On top of this, Madden suffered from the same initial problem that College Football 27 suffered from, which was that the tutorial for the new timed catching mechanic simply didn't work. The game prompts the player to choose your preference for settings for things like passing mode, kicking meter, and catching, and also gives you the option to test each method right there from the setting menu. But, since timed catching was disabled by default, when I pressed "Try" for the timed catching demo tutorial, the timed catching mechanic was not temporarily enabled for the tutorial, and so the timed catching mechanic didn't work. Since I had already played College Football 27, I immediately recognized the problem, didn't have to go to the internet to figure out what I was doing wrong, and was able to go straight to the settings to turn the feature on.

The timed catch meter overlaps the pass meter,
making the catch meter difficult to read.

Once I enabled timed catching and re-tried the tutorial, I found the mechanic to be even more difficult to use than it was in College Football 27 (if you can believe that!). The problem was that the passing meter was overlapping and obstructing the catch meter, making it even harder to see the movement of the timing indicator along the meter.

Thus, my initial impressions of Madden 27 was that it was a visual and auditory mess -- a cacophony of sound and unreadable U.I. -- and full of technical incompetence. Yeah, sure, many of the same features and options that initially impressed me with College Football 27 are here too. The Coaching Adjustments menu, Custom Adjustments, and so forth are in Madden 27 as well. But these didn't initially impress me the way they did with College Football 27 because I had already played with them in College Football 27, and was also already well aware of their shortcomings and limitations.

In contrast to College Football, Madden does include the new Coaching Adjustment settings in the Franchise settings menu, so I don't have to exit Franchise entirely to change my adjustment settings. That's good. But these settings aren't saved with the rest of the Franchise settings; so changes made in Franchise apply to other game modes as well, and vice-versa. And unlike gameplay sliders, I can't save and load Coaching Adjustment pre-sets. This means that if I want to keep Coaching Adjustments specifically for Franchise play, and have different (or default) settings for Play Now and online play, I have to change these settings every time I switch game modes. Heck, there isn't even a "Restore Defaults" command. So just like with College Football, this feature feels like a bust.

Custom Adjustments, on the other hand, are not available in Franchise at all. Just like in College Football 27, I have to exit Franchise entirely if I want to add or change Custom Adjustments. And since there's no way to accurately scout an opponent's play-calling in Franchise (or CFB's Dynasty) and then practice against their plays, I never use the Custom Adjustments because I don't know what Custom Adjustments are good to use or when would be a good time to use them.

Coaching Adjustment settings are available within the Franchise settings menu, but are still globally applied.

If Madden 27 was going to impress me, it was going to have to do it in other ways...

The Sinking City was a really good Lovecraftian noir with absolutely abysmal movement and gunplay. When a sequel was announced, I was excited to see how FrogWares would iterate upon the strengths of the original game (the noir elements) and hoped that they would improve or sand down the rougher parts (gunplay). But when the sequel was stated as being a more traditional, linear "survival horror" game with a greater emphasis on combat and action, my interest immediately waned. Instead of iterating on the things that made the first game successful, FrogWares chose to double-down on the things that made it borderline unplayable. What an absolutely dumb-founding decision!

I understand that a lot of the questionable design choices in this game may have been the result of a multi-year legal battle with The Sinking City's publisher, Nacon, and FrogWares may have had to design and develop this game without knowing whether or not they would legally be able to use the Sinking City intellectual property. Much of the game probably had to be designed in such a way that it could be argued in court as being "legally distinct" from The Sinking City. My guess is that as this development got deeper, designed and story diverged to a point in which it became difficult or impossible to re-insert the original game's characters and exact setting. This results in a game that feels almost like a generic knock-off of The Sinking City.

We get a protagonist who feels like a cheap knock off of the original protagonist, complete with the same outfit and initials, but without the gruff personality -- or much of any personality at all. The city itself is now Arkham instead of Oakmont. The streets are laid out differently, and it isn't a full open world (owing to the city being completely flooded and evacuated), but some of the names are the same. For example, one of the early destinations of the sequel is the Devil's Reef Hotel. Same name as in the first game, but now it's more of a cabaret than a simple inn. Maybe it's a franchise?

Things will look familiar, but the characters and setting are actually different.

These changes make sense in context of the legal situation. The change in gameplay and story makes a lot less sense. Maybe FrogWares was worried that making a noir mystery game would also not be "legally distinct" enough, and so they felt it necessary to change genres completely. Unfortunately, the genre they chose put them very outside of their comfort zone, and it shows in a final product that is extremely rough around the edges.

I really don't want to be too hard on FrogWares though. After all, their studio is located in Ukraine, in the middle of an unjustified invasion from a belligerent dictator who is one of the most evil people living in the world today. This is a fact that the game reminds the players of as soon as you boot up the game. So before I go any further, I want to let everyone at FrogWares know that I sympathize with your situation (both the legal one, and the military one), and I wish that my government and NATO were doing more to help you and keep your friends and family safe. But I'm also genuinely impressed with how effectively your country has stood its ground and held off against a former global superpower. I'm happy that you were able to retain the rights to an IP that you built. I'm also horrified by the unnecessary violence that has beset you. I hope that Ukraine perseveres and bloodies Putin's nose so thoroughly that he never tries a stunt like this again. And maybe your successful resistance might even make China think twice before invading Taiwan...

But I'm sorry to say that I really didn't like this game. I sincerely hope that any future games that you make are more in-line with The Sinking City 1 and your other past Sherlock Holmes catalogue. That's what you do well!

Slinking and slithering

Right off the bat, The Sinking City 2 suffered a hard crash to the PS5 dashboard before I had even finished the tutorial. So that wasn't a good sign. It exacerbated frustrations that I was already having with the core gameplay and environments.

The game hard crashed during the tutorial.

Early in the game, I was having a really hard time just seeing what was going on around me. The game is too dark. Environments are so dimly lit and cluttered that it's hard to get my bearings in many locations. Even when I cranked the brightness up by like 50%, the environments still looked washed out and murky, with very little contrast. Nothing stands out. Everything just kind of blended into the background. I had to constantly check the map to get my bearings, and to find any loot or items of interest that were highlighted there, because I had trouble seeing them on the default brightness settings. I eventually got used to it, and environments in the mid-game seemed to be more evenly lit.

My heart also sank when the first enemies were just zombies. The creature design of the first game wasn't great, but I was hoping for something a bit more creative than zombies in the sequel.

I'm not a superstitious person. I fully understand that the "Madden Curse" is a common, simple, statistical phenomenon: a regression to the mean. EA choses elite players who had a standout season the past year. Of course these players are going to see statistical drop-offs. And since they are elite players who give their all and put their bodies on the line to win, they probably have a higher chance of getting themselves hurt.

That being said, my understanding is that professional athletes are notoriously superstitious. So I do not know why any NFL player would allow themselves to be put on the cover of Madden. I'm guessing that the NFLPA contracts must include some obligation that the player agree to the Madden cover if offered.

Personally, I hate the idea of a "cover athlete" for sports games, as a matter of principle. I haven't played enough of Madden 27 yet to say whether or not Caleb Williams cover appearance is at all representative of the game. Maybe it is; maybe it isn't.

In any case, the "Madden Curse" struck Caleb late in the week 2 matchup against the Vikings. As soon as the game was over, and I heard that Tyson Bagent was also in the concussion protocol, I put a bet on the Eagles to beat Chicago in week 3.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh.

The "Madden Curse" struck Caleb Williams in week 2.

Well it turned out that the Bears maybe didn't need Caleb all that bad. Or Tyson, for that matter. They clobbered the Eagles with 3rd stringer Case Keenum slinging the ball around the field.