Rugby League 26

I cover shooters for a living, so when I get handed a sports sim to evaluate I come at it purely from a systems and online-performance angle: does the game work, do the controls feel tight, and is the multiplayer worth your time. Rugby League 26 fails on at least two of those three counts, and it fails loudly. The context matters here. This is the first Rugby League game released since Rugby League Live 4 in 2017, meaning Big Ant Studios had eight years to build something worthy. What shipped instead landed to a Mostly Negative rating on Steam, sitting at 35% positive from nearly 500 reviews at the time of writing. The community reaction was not casual disappointment. Multiple reviewers and long-time fans described the launch as unacceptable, with server outages preventing the game from loading for extended periods in the first days after release. For a game with online PVP and a card-collection Pro Team mode at its centre, that is a critical failure right out of the gate. On the pitch, the experience is rough in ways that go beyond cosmetic bugs. Passing, the single most repeated action in any Rugby League match, feels stiff and misdirected, with targeting icons switching at the wrong moment so the ball ends up somewhere unintended. The hooker routinely spawns out of position after a tackle, which cascades into broken play-the-ball sequences. Defenders are nearly impossible to switch between when marking up. The game also implements outdated rules, notably restarting with a scrum after the ball goes into touch, a rule that was changed in 2021 in real life. These are not fringe edge cases. They are core to how the sport works. Career Mode has some surface improvements, the coach version now lets you allocate budget across categories, and the Be a Pro path at least gives your created player a reasonable starting stat line rather than zeroes across the board. But player progression flattens out quickly, squad AI drops known props onto the wing and hands them kicking duties, and there are no individual season stats or trophy tracking despite previous games in the series having those. The Pro Team mode, which is effectively the card-collector fantasy squad builder, works offline and online, but its staying power depends entirely on whether Big Ant can stabilise the servers and keep patching the surrounding game into shape. The presentation is uneven in the way sports games often are when the budget is stretched. Photogrammetry face scans look solid in close-up replays, but player models underneath are largely identical, so once the ball is in motion everyone starts to blur together regardless of who you are fielding. Commentary is misaligned with on-field events often enough to become actively distracting. The licensed clubs span NRL, NRL Women, and both UK Super League tiers, which is a genuine plus for fans of the sport in England as well as Australia, and cross-platform play is supported. The honest read is this: Rugby League 26 shipped in a state that needed several more months of work. Patches are coming, and the underlying sport does translate into something with occasional momentum when a run breaks through the line and actually feels physical. But the fundamentals, passing logic, defensive switching, rules accuracy, and stable online connections, needed to be solid on day one. They were not. If you are a League die-hard with no other option and a high tolerance for ongoing patches, there is a functional game buried in here. Everyone else should stay on the sideline. Fred, Scout Team