Mutant League Football (Genesis/Mega Drive)
After a nuclear apocalypse, zombie uprising, alien invasion, time-space ruptures, and multiple supernovas, you’d have to imagine that American Football would change a fair bit. Funnily enough though, after all of these galaxy shattering cataclysms, people put aside the talk of war and thermonuclear death and decided to settle future disputes on the field, playing a game that still seemed somewhat recognizable to us in the 21st Century. Mutant League Football definitely has some hard edges and almost always a few guaranteed fatalities per game, but in this Sega Genesis title that features football teams with skeletons, aliens, and a coach who really just seems to be the devil in disguise, the actual mutants who do show up seem positively mundane by comparison.
The biggest departure from football as we know it definitely has to do with the players on the field. The game’s 16 regular teams and 3 all-star teams are all composed of unusual players who have different advantages and disadvantages based on what kind of monster they are or sci-fi trope they play into. Skeletons are speedy but fragile players, and since the game only lets you play with preset player combinations, you’ll definitely want to pick a team that puts these players to good use rather than something like the deliberately frail Sixty Whiners which is composed entirely of them. Trolls exist on the other side of the spectrum with barely any speed but plenty of brawn to allow them to serve as a powerful defensive line, and since you can fight back with running the ball, sometimes having a troll plod down the field can be effective so long as he’s willing to fight his way through. Robots fall into a similar category as the skeletons in that speed comes with low durability, but a robot can handle passes better than the more broadly skilled skeletons. Aliens pack an interesting roll where they become harder to tackle due to their maneuverability and they might be the best at snagging passes out of the air, but the actual mutant Super-Humans are strange in that they’re essentially the middle of the pack in most regards. That does mean many are still heavy hitters who can handle a ball well though, so having one on your team at least comes with greater general flexibility.
The species of your players isn’t so important that a team is doomed if their composition isn’t perfect, but the game does provide a skull rating system to best communicate how well the players synergize with their roles on the field. Once you do have your particular team of killer characters ready to roughhouse in a more extreme version of football, you’ll find the fields you play on can be just as lethal. Players won’t always be able to safely run the ball to the endzones, as hazards litter specific stadiums based on their themes. An arena out in space might have drop offs into the void players might accidentally run into while evading defenders, mines and firepits can kill any unlucky player who stumbles into them, and rocks can lead to a play ending early as you face plant from running over them. Rather than only needing to plan around the opposing team you must factor in the field’s quirks as well, and some can’t even be avoided. If you play on the rubber field expect constant fumbles, and the ice stadiums might crack beneath a player’s feet. There are some more typical stadiums if you want things a bit more fair, but in a game where you can crank up the injury slider so players are practically dying at the end of every play, chaos is encouraged and usually fun to integrate. There is a Reserves option you can toggle where dead players have to be replaced by backup, and while this can lead to fun situations in a single game setting like a team being whittled down to hardly anyone on the field, playing the game’s Playoffs mode can lead to some unfortunate frustrations if the enemy teams manage to wipe out too many of your players regardless of how well you’re playing.
Luckily, the game’s Playoffs season mode lets you freely customize most of its rules in the same way you can do a casual match, the player even able to set the quarter length so that things can be quick and snappy or more drawn out. Naturally, faster play can lead to a player making early headway and stalling out the rest of the game while longer games can allow the opposition to have the time to make comebacks, but the time options allow for players to find the desired pace and risk factor even if they’re trying to win the tournament mode. The bracket tournament isn’t too unusual from a typical playoff setup otherwise, the player trying to take their team to the top by winning a sequence of games.
Since Mutant League Football was developed by Electronic Arts, it was able to carry over the game engine used in Madden games of the early 1990s. Almost all of the normal rules of American Football are still in place, the game mostly a contest to score points by moving the ball up the field either by running it or passing. While in possession of the ball each team has four attempts to try and make at least a net profit of 10 forward yards on a 100 yard field. If they succeed they repeat it until they’re in scoring range, but if they fail they’ll need to relinquish the ball to the other team either immediately where they were last positioned or by punting it across the field. Teams can try to score three points by kicking towards a field goal instead, but these provide less points than having a player carry the ball into an endzone for six points. There is supposedly a unique rule in Mutant League Football where you can score an impressive 11 points by stealing the ball and scoring a touchdown when the opposing team is attempting a 2-point conversion, but it’s such an unlikely scenario I couldn’t confirm its existence outside of the manual. The team with the most points after four quarters will win the game, meaning pretty much anyone familiar with regular American Football will be able to pick up and play the game with relative ease.
Having so much of the regular sport intact allows for the typical strategic play involved in the sport carry over quite cleanly while the irreverent humor and monstrous teams can be added on top of it to give the game more character and some unusual tricks. Coaches happily insult the other team, players come up with quips and puns after a particularly good play and even have names parodying famous NFL players of the time, and even the skull on the uprights does a gleeful jump when you guide a field goal between the poles successfully. Rather than only factoring in individual player stats, you’ll often be more concerned with whether an opposing team member is a troll or a robot, and murder definitely takes the concept of deliberately injuring the opposition to the extreme. However, every team does seem to use the same playbook in Mutant League Football, something that is good for allowing players to learn the defensive and offensive positions and how they are built to counter each other. It does also mean that, for the most part, you’re dealing with a batch of realistic and effective plays, the game even making sure to indicate which plays might be considered extremely risky by placing them under the Wild header. When a play is being executed the player is only able to control one player, the person with the ball being the choice on offense while playing defense allows the player to press a button to switch to the defender nearest to the ball carrier so you can personally tackle them to end the play. The other players will all be controlled by a fairly intelligent AI based on the play you chose before the snap, but naturally the interplay between the tactics of both sides can determine whether or not a specific play works well or not.
Looking in your playbook though, besides the thematically appropriate renames given to certain plays to make them fit in a more monstrous and humorous world, you might spot a little play called Bribe Ref. This is exactly what it sounds like, a team able to briefly get the ref on their side to call bogus penalties against the other team to set them back some yards. Luckily for the victim, the referee’s calls are transparently unfair, and while you can’t contest them, you can quickly change the ref’s mind either with your own bribe or take things further and outright kill him. Killing a referee comes with a 5 yard penalty enforced by the new guy though, but this plays into Mutant League Football’s surprisingly balanced handling of its over the top set of unusual actions you can take on the field. If you need out of a tight spot or to earn some easy yardage the ref tampering is a valid but not wildly effective tactic, this also describing your team’s set of Nasty audibles as well.
Audibles are usually the way a team can change its play when on the field to respond to how the opposing team has their players arranged, but Nasty audibles are all a set of special powers that are determined by which team you picked to play as. These come in various forms such as the defensive team turning invisible so the offense has little hope of effectively avoiding them during that play, a rocket blast that can send a player almost thirty yards forward provided he’s not clipped as he leaps over the teams, and even the option to booby trap the ball to blow up anyone who grabs it. Most of these options incur no penalty and can only be used once per half so that they should be used strategically rather than flippantly, but they can provide an interesting complication to play for the most part. The explosive fumble is unfortunately one tainted by the usually smart AI players turning absolutely foolish, all of them diving for it even though it’s transparently obvious when a quarterback is pulling this particularly lethal trick. The control swapping trick can be rather annoying as well since players can’t tell which Nasty audible is picked until they feels its effects, and in a game where the central line is usually a hot zone, it’s practically inevitable a control swapped quarterback is going to offer himself up on a platter by running into them or alternatively running too far back by mistake and losing a lot of ground. Super Speed, bomb tossing, and others though all feel like they can be better handled by the team who feels the effects, and their limited uses do at least mean the less fair ones aren’t going to be overly impactful unless Reserves are enabled and you just lost a swathe of your team to an obvious trick your teammates threw themselves into.
Mutant League Football keeping its more extreme ideas reined in or having the player in charge of how impactful they might be does mean this mostly ends up as a well built football game of its time with a lot more personality and fun gimmicks added to the experience. Being released in 1993 for the Sega Genesis does lead to some of its unfortunate limitations though. For the most part you’ll have the screen focus pretty well on the action, but certain plays do strain it a little. While kick returns are usually straightforward affairs, you are relying on the game to position characters properly rather than having the viewing angle needed to approach them via direct control, but it’s the passes that can be the most disorienting. When you pull back for a pass, three windows appear over the top of the screen, covering up some players to show you how three receivers are doing down field. These windows can’t, by their very nature, give you the full context of where the player is, and while passing to that player is as easy as pressing their associated button, just because they’re ordered from left to right doesn’t mean the receiver in the leftmost window is the farthest left on the field. You’ll need to look at your play before selecting it to know where each labelled receiver intends to move, but it’s not too hard to get used to this display method so passing can still be done fairly well even with the inherent hardware and game engine limitations on how it can present the information visually.
THE VERDICT: Being able to build off the Madden engine from Electronic Arts’s more realistic sports series does Mutant League Football some huge favors. It’s able to include all of the expected gameplay features of a football title, the plays allowing for a good amount of strategic interplay between teams while also having the tackling and player maneuvering be simple and satisfying. However, add in all the monsters, unusual stadiums, and wild tricks and you have something brimming with character, humor, and even some additional variables now that things like blowing up the enemy team or turning invisible for a play are on the table. The unusual aspects mostly interfere just the right amount to make things spicier but rarely unfair, so the only thing that keeps this from being an even more exhilarating game of extreme football are unfortunate realities like the limitations of the pass window concept.
And so, I give Mutant League Football for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…
A GOOD rating. While a fan of American Football will find their beloved sport relatively intact underneath the science fiction zaniness, even someone less familiar with the sport can still find the extra touches inviting and amusing. Paying attention to the playbook is definitely key for any kind of fan as they are vital to making sense of the pass windows, but besides the limitations imposed on the game by being released during the 16-bit era of gaming, Mutant League Football still comes out almost as sharp as its spiky metal ball. All of the important underlying factors for ensuring plays interact properly are present and the player is given enough tools to be strategic or just settle into a set of plays with moderate success rates if they aren’t eager to complicate things. If you want to turn the injuries up to max and watch trolls shatter skeletons you can get your fix, but if you want to go through some tough Playoffs you can also find your understanding of the game and its new monstrous variables pays off rather well.
Mutant League Football is still a sports game at heart and it never forgets that when it comes to making sure things run solidly, but it also knows that spilling blood on the field as a bunch of aliens and mutants are blown to pieces by an explosive football has its own over the top appeal. The ability to balance the inclusion of such absurd fantasy ideas with the fundamentals of a recognizable sport is Mutant League Football’s biggest success, and once you wrap your head around its twist to the football formula, you can find a game that’s rewarding to play both as a serious sport and as a silly way to watch space monsters play dirty.