AFL 26 is on the way up the ladder, but still trips over familiar problems.
AFL 26 arrives partway through the 2025 AFL season, with an opportunity for some to mimic their team’s road to glory and others to rectify a disastrous start through fantasy, while they call for heads to roll.
It builds upon the shaky foundations of AFL 23, which was panned by players for launching plagued with crippling bugs and glitches and a lack of meaningful career mode, which saw it quickly fade into obscurity. Like many, I put it down after a few disappointing sessions and never returned.
AFL 26 is in a much better state – certainly not perfect, but the game-breaking instances are few and far between and there’s plenty to keep you occupied. I’ve had a couple of crashes, and there are oddities, like players flouting the 6-6-6 rule to walk blindly through a centre bounce, robotic commentary not matching the play and an abundance of bald coaches, but by AFL game standards, it’s serviceable.
AFL 26 is packed with content, including the full rosters of the AFL and AFLW, as well as state league competitions and faithfully recreated stadiums from across Australia. There will always be differing opinions about player ratings – AFL 26 declares Patrick Cripps as the best player in the game – but Big Ant’s signature academy allows you to customise all of that to your liking; just make sure to do it before starting a new career, as changes don’t apply to existing save files.
That’s where AFL 26 has invested its time: presenting a more polished product for the 2025 season and offering a wealth of modes through quick play, a single season, online matches and lengthy player or management careers. There’s also a pro team mode, and while it’s light-on and lacking a global community of gamblers, it does a decent enough impersonation of EA’s FUT if you’re a soccer fan or HUT for the hockey players. While it does feel a bit like the Wish[dot]com imitation, if you’re addicted to ultimate team and Aussie rules footy, it’ll likely satisfy the cravings.
The management career mode, commencing with the 2025 Premiership Season, is where I expect players to spend time for the long haul. It’s almost as comprehensive off the field, with options to manage finances, schedule travel and tinker with player workloads and training schedules.
While the off-field management doesn’t have a great bearing on game day, it does breathe life into a multi-season play through, with salary caps, trades and free agency. That has a separate difficulty slider, so much to the chagrin of Big Footy every October, ‘PlayStation trades’ are back in play when it’s set to easy; stars of the competition can move clubs for a half-eaten packet of chips. It’s only missing an option to listen to your club’s heart and soul, the supporters, and sack an underperforming coach mid-season.
On the field, AFL 26 is much the same as its predecessor, with only minor tweaks to gameplay and an extra coat of polish. This is the closest an AFL videogame has looked in motion to the modern game, with all 36 players dynamically moving in one half of the field. But in practice, it still struggles to capture the speed of footy and can frustrate with questionably overpowered AI opposition. With the ball in-hand, players also move far more robotically, as if they’re being controlled by a D-pad.
The requirement to charge a long kick, if you don’t want to dump kick directly out on the full, weakens quicker players. The tackler nearly always catches even the best players before they can kick, which turns it into a tackle fest, as has been the grievance of AFL games for several console generations. Only this time, players who aren’t charging a kick are given much too long to free their hands to release a handball, reducing every game to a scrappy affair mired by incorrect disposals. Actually, that’s a very realistic portrayal of the AFL in 2025.
It’s not an overly satisfying gameplay experience, however, if you’re trying to chain together fast plays. Tacklers are overpowered and ball movement is too slow, with handball and kicks beyond about 25 metres destined to hang in the air, leaving the ball to bounce around between the 50 metre arcs.
This leads AFL 26 to star as a slow intercepting game. The key to success is mastering the marking mini-game and picking off a few short kicks – which do work as well as they have in any AFL game – to launch shots from 50 or eventually bomb long blindly in hope.
That’s partially unavoidable, as there’s no camera angle that truly does justice to Australia’s 360-degree game. Options are plentiful, but the best angle remains side-on. This limits your view to short possessions and often forces you to kick and hope beyond the field of vision. The zoomed-out perspective keeps more of the ground in view but makes quick handballs even harder to execute; by the time you realise you have the ball, you’ve already been tackled. Zooming in too closely turns all kicks into guesswork and exposes more of the game’s visual blemishes. While most players are recognisable and the stadiums are well-crafted, it looks dated for a cross-generation PS5 title this late in the console’s cycle, with the lifeless crowd particularly jarring.
AFL 26 reminds me of losing myself to AFL Live 2004 and AFL Premiership 2005 on PS2. They were clunky, glitchy and had some annoying shortcomings, but I could overlook those to spend countless hours virtually playing the sport I loved. That’s who AFL 26 is for.
This iteration corrects many of AFL 23’s missteps to deliver one of the best Aussie rules football games in years; although there’s been a dearth of strong contenders. It feels like the follow up we expected to 2020’s AFL Evolution 2, another of the better instalments, with similar longevity, quirks and limitations on-field. Serious supporters will still grumble about the inaccuracies, while those who enjoy bigger budget sport games will find it too clunky and repetitive to hang around for long.
AFL 26 is for the fans who love their footy enough to forgive the rough edges, push through the clunky gameplay, and accept the long-standing frustrations that have plagued AFL games for decades and likely always will, to chase their dream of lifting the Premiership Cup.
AFL 26 was reviewed using a promotional code on PS5 provided by the developer. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.
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