AFL 26

I'll be straight with you: I cover shooters for a living, so when the Scout Team drops an Aussie rules football game on my desk, I approach it the same way I approach a new battle royale - does the core loop hold up under pressure, does the input feel responsive, and does online actually work? AFL 26 scores on the first two counts more often than it fails, but the third is a different conversation. On the field, the game is noticeably tighter than its predecessor. Mark contests have real physicality now - you cannot spam the mark button and expect results, positioning and timing both matter. Set shot goalkicking has been overhauled to add genuine tension: rush the timing or misjudge the angle and you are shanking it, full stop. Tackling is the engine of every possession battle, and that is where the design starts to show cracks. Tacklers are aggressive to the point of slowing the game down considerably, long kicks hang in the air and invite chaos, and fast ball movement through handball chains is harder to execute than it should be. The game rewards a slow, physical, intercepting style - which is either a realistic simulation of modern AFL or a frustration factory depending on your taste. Fatigue now builds through matches and forces you to rotate your approach, which is a smart wrinkle that stops you running the same pattern all game. Off the field there is more to do than AFL 23 ever offered. The management career mode covers salary caps, trades, free agency, and travel scheduling across multiple seasons. A new single-player Player Career mode lets you build a created player from draft day through to premiership contention in either the AFL or AFLW. Then there is PRO TEAM, the squad-building live mode with weekly challenges, card packs, and an auction system - the mode with the most hours potential and the most community friction. The pack-luck grind and the contract system have already drawn complaints from the player base, and specific player-card objectives not tracking correctly is a reported issue at time of writing. Big Ant is patching actively, which matters, but patching has historically introduced new bugs alongside fixes here, so keep that in mind. The technical picture on PC is mixed. Steam user sentiment sits around the mid-fifties percentage-wise, which is not a glowing signal. There are occasional crashes, commentary that does not match the play, and AI that makes odd positioning decisions. Xbox users had a rougher launch than PS5, though patches have addressed some of the early instability. The game is not running on truly next-gen architecture, which caps what Big Ant can do with visual fidelity and crowd simulation. For a controller-first sports game this is fine - you are not here for ray tracing - but frame drops during congested pack situations are a real thing. Who is this for? Diehard AFL fans who were burned by AFL 23 and want to know if it is safe to come back: cautiously yes. Casual sports game fans looking for a polished entry point: check back after a few more patches. Anyone who has never watched a game of Australian rules football: the tutorials are there for a reason, use every single one of them before you touch a match, because the difficulty curve does not care about your feelings even on the easier settings. Fred, Scout Team