Blitz: The League II Reviews
Ava White
Updated on April 08, 2026
After losing the NFL license to Electronic Arts, Midway decided to soldier on with the Blitz series, releasing the non-licensed Blitz: The League in 2005 on PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Now free of the constraints of NFL guidelines, this new Blitz (with fictional teams and players) kept all the over-the-top gameplay, but explored the dark underside of pro football too, adding in things like excessive violence, drug use, prostitution, gambling, and corrupt league officials, among various other seedy things. This League tackled subject matter you'd never see in any licensed sports game.
A quick port of the game to the Xbox 360 arrived in 2006, but despite a few minor cosmetic enhancements this was essentially the same game that gamers played the previous year.
This brings us to Blitz: The League II, which offers up the patented outlandish in-your-face football action that Blitz fans love and enough violence, blood, broken bones, and viscera to satisfy the gorehounds who are looking for a pick-up-and-play football game.
Like the original Blitz: The League, this new Blitz features a storyline: in this one you portray "Franchise," a cocky two-way footballer who spurns The League's powerful commissioner and refuses to play for the high-profile team that drafted him, insisting that he will only suit up for his hometown squad. At an introductory press conference, you answer questions and your replies will determine what positions you play as well as boost physical attributes like speed and strength.
After the press conference you get to choose a logo and customize your team's uniforms, and then it's off to the gridiron. The League is made up of three Divisions, with Division One featuring the League's best teams and Division Three featuring the worst; guess where you start off. Your goal is to work your way up to the top and win each Division's championship. Win the Division One championship and you're the best of the best.
On the field, the action in Blitz: The League II is stripped down and pumped up: there are eight players per side instead of the standard 11; quarters are two minutes long; you need 30 yards to pick up a first down as opposed to a mere 10; there are only about 25 plays to choose from for each team; there are no substitutions; there are no penalties; and the computer has a tendency to cheat when it falls behind, although the cheating isn't quite as blatant as it was in the prior game. This might sound like a barebones football game that would get boring quick, but the action is fast and up-tempo and underneath it all football basics and the strategies of the game are generally respected.
With all this in mind, Blitz plays over-the-top: with only two minutes per quarter coupled with the constant need for major yardage, players have to call big plays on offense and try to keep from getting burned by the other team's big plays when on defense. This leads to lots of huge runs, acrobatic pass catches and gigantic hits that look like they should kill the guy on the receiving end. In Blitz: The League II dirty and late hits are not only allowed and encouraged, they're also a legitimate form of pass defense.
Dirty hits can lead to even more violence: you can beat and kick downed enemy players in between plays, lowering their stamina and leaving them open to game-ending injuries later on down the line. The League apparently has no referees, since it's perfectly acceptable to yank off an opposing player's helmet and then batter him about the head with it while blood splatters everywhere.
All of these big plays and dirty hits, in addition to scoring points and taunting defenders provide fuel for your Clash meter. Clash can be used to make Blitz: The League II's big plays and big hits even bigger, and when the meter is full you can enter Unleashed mode which allows you to pull off monster plays on offense and bone-crushing hits on defense. Using Unleashed while on offense often guarantees a touchdown no matter where you are on the field, while an Unleashed hit on defense will seriously injure the ballcarrier, force a fumble, or both. Knowing when to use Clash and Unleashed is the key to victory in this game, and the slow-motion visual payoff of your ballcarrier hurdling over - or trampling - enemy defenders never gets old. You can even fake out a defender so badly he'll wreck his knee and miss the rest of the season.
The same goes for when you're playing defense, where the guy with the ball gets rocked in mid-air with a stiff clothesline or beaten with his own helmet and then slammed face-first into the turf; you know you shouldn't be enjoying the carnage, but you still smirk anyways.
Speaking of carnage, Blitz: The League II features quite a bit of it: you can target the body parts of opposing players and enter into a button-tapping minigame where you try and cause as much damage as possible. Do it right, and you're treated to an internal view of the injury taking place: bones snap like twigs; tendons and muscles rip apart like taffy; and blood and bodily fluids splatter all over the place. It's pretty gruesome stuff, and if you ever wondered what a ruptured scrotum looked like, Blitz: The League II will satisfy your curiosity. Satisfy your curiosity 10 times, and you get an achievement.
Luckily, all the teams in Blitz: The League II have top-notch medical staffs: when one of your players gets hurt, you can fix them up by playing a pair of minigames where you try and inject them with a needle to numb the pain, or use the thumbsticks to snap their broken bones back into place. Do it right, and that fractured tibia might cause the afflicted player to only miss two or three plays.
Blitz: The League II's onfield action is totally ridiculous. But that's the whole point; this game is the anti-Madden. The only thing you can't do here is shoot defenders with a handgun while you run towards the end zone.
In between the gridiron stuff, you can upgrade your players' skills via training and drugs (both legal and not so legal), buy new gym equipment and gear, and win girlfriends, endorsement deals, and trophies. The plot also plays out here via cutscenes. The storyline in Blitz: The League II isn't bad, and there are a few mildly surprising plot twists to keep you entertained. Former NFL players Lawrence Taylor and Bill Romanowski lend their voices to these sequences, as does Jay Mohr as Franchise's sleazy agent. The makers of the game also use these interludes to take pokes at the NFL, with veiled references to Michael Vick, Adam Jones, and the Minnesota Vikings' Booze Cruise, among other things. If you follow the National Football League, you'll get a bit of a laugh out of these potshots.
The campaign in Blitz: The League II is a one-shot deal: once you've completed it (it'll take no more than a couple of afternoons), there's no way to continue on with your career once you win Division One championship; you either start an all-new campaign and watch the same cutscenes and listen to the same dialog again, or you can while away your time playing exhibition games or bonus modes like prison football or a mode where every hit causes a fumble. These diversions are mildly amusing.
Blitz: The League II also features multiplayer, either locally or on Xbox Live, for up to two players. It's basic stuff with no support for online leagues, and there aren't too many people playing the game over Xbox Live, which makes matches hard to find.
Presentation-wise, Blitz: The League II is pedestrian. It looks better than the original League, but not by much. The animations are a bit robotic, and the player models could use a few more polygons. Cheerleaders, trainers, and idle players on the sidelines wouldn't have looked good on the previous generation's hardware. The stadiums, cutscenes, and weather effects all look pretty good, though.
Sound in Blitz: The League II fares a bit better, with bone-crunching audio during the games and okay voice-acting. Frank Caliendo does his John Madden impersonation here, and wrings some laughs out of his oft-repeated lines. The music, which consists primarily of football-themed rap and hard rock tunes done by artists you've never heard of, is mostly terrible.
Blitz: The League II has 50 Xbox 360 achievements to chase down, mostly on the single-player side of the ball. You're rewarded for basic football stuff like throwing for certain amounts of yardage or scoring X number of touchdowns in a single game; winning League awards; causing injuries; performing touchdown dances; knocking out certain players; and procuring girlfriends. Some of the achievements are fairly easy to get, while others will require more than one play through the campaign to acquire. Average players should expect to pick up about 15 achievements on their first sojourn through the campaign.
Blitz: The League II's brand of pigskin follies isn't for everyone; it's ludicrous and often gruesome. If however, you find Madden and the NCAA games a bit too laid back, you might want to join this action-packed League.
4.0
