I’m really going to date my Gen-X self with this, but I think it’s important in the interest of candor. I began playing Madden back in 1992 on my Sega Genesis system. I stuck with the game through all of its ups and downs all the way through 2023.

At the time I gave up on Madden I had spent about 6 years thoroughly frustrated with it. I won’t go into specifics because this isn’t a Madden-bashing, just an account of my journey of playing football video games that began 33 years ago.

It was early to mid 2024 (I believe) when I discovered Maximum Football on Steam and when the Early Release came out I jumped on it.

Are there some bugs and glitches in the game? Absolutely. But we see those in every game released from every studio regardless of size and funding, so that doesn’t bother or sway me on the game–and this isn’t a review post either, I may do one of those later.

But here’s the 3 things I asked myself when I began playing Maximum Football:

• Is the game about football? Not just using football as a vehicle but actually about the game of football.
• Are the developers active, cultivating a strong community, and paying attention to feedback from that community?
• Is the game in its present condition fun to play?

Again, this isn’t a Madden-bashing post, but I gave up on Madden when the answers all 3 of those same questions became a clear “No” in my opinion.

With Maximum Football the answer to all three questions, in my opinion, is clearly “Yes”.

They’ve got some in-game purchases you can make to enhance your experience and support the developers of course, but the fact is they’ve produced and released a game that’s about the game of football and that you can get and play absolutely free, plus some aspects of it which come free are simply amazing to me, like the depth of immersion with the Dynasty mode.

The developers are active online in various places and they have a busy Discord server where I never see anything get overlooked or go unanswered. It’s also fairly moderated to keep the ever-present online toxicity away. They’ve even got a channel on the server specifically for reporting bugs to the dev’s and another asking the community for feedback that I’ve seen posts from become edits in game updates.

As for the gameplay, I can only comment about playing it on PC through Steam, not on the X-Box or Playstation versions, but my experience is it’s just about on par with the last few years of Madden I played. There’s some things missing and some things glitchy yet, but like I said that’s true of all game releases. I remember going half a season with Madden a couple years back where we didn’t have kickoffs in the game. Instead the receiving team just automatically started at the 25 yard line.

But there’s also aspects of it that I think are better than, or missing from, recent years of Madden too, and some of them make this game highly enjoyable for me, a fan of football.

Anyway, there’s lots of people talking and making videos about this topic already, I even thought about making a video myself for it but not having purchased Madden in the last few years I didn’t think that would be fair.

My opinion, and it’s only that, the opinion of an old guy who enjoys football and playing a football game, is Maximum Football is totally worth checking out, especially since you can do so for free!

I don’t think it needs to be a binary choice of Maximum Football vs. Madden, if you want to drop $70+ on Madden do so and I hope you enjoy it, but it costs you nothing to also pickup Maximum Football and see for yourself which you enjoy playing more.