Maximum Football PC Review

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Gridiron on the PC may be a niche market, but over the years the PC platform has been host to some truly great gridiron simulations - the FBPro series, Front Office Football, and of course EA's Madden NFL to name a few. However, in more recent times, very little progress has been made, particularly in the areas of user customization - an aspect most other genres on the PC have long since embraced. This is where Maximum Football comes in - a PC gridiron game which puts user interaction first. Want an 8 man indoor league with your own created teams, user made uniforms and all? Want to mix and match rules between Canadian and American style? Want to design a playbook with custom formations? It's all possible with MaxFB, and then some.

One of the unique things about MaxFB is it was primarily made by one man - David Winter of WinterValley Software. While the game is under the label of Matrix Games (the publisher), it was David who did most of the work, and work he did. Although MaxFB was originally announced in April of 2001 and intended for a 2002 release, it has taken until early 2006 for it to hit gold status. That's a long time for a game to be developed. To think, during this game's development, terrorists knocked down the Twin Towers in New York City, the US and its allies went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, NASA sent robots to Mars, and Conan O'Brien was named the successor to Jay Leno.

When you fire up MaxFB for the first time, you'll notice straight away that the menu's are not designed with convention in mind. First of all, there is no "Options" section to speak off - all you can do from the Main Menu is choose to play a "Quick Game", a "League Game", or exit the game entirely. It is before each game where you define your options - whether they be the rules and boundaries of the game about to be played, or the game's visual detail and resolution. I can understand having the rules option menu come up pre game, but having a general "Options" section for users to toggle their technical settings accessible from the Main Menu would seem to have made more sense - there's a reason just about every PC game has this. A lot of the times graphical detail options are settings you tweak once and forget about, so having them pop up before every game seems like a waste of menu space really.

The "Quick Game" mode is pretty self explanatory, but "League Game" is where the meat of MaxFB is located. The League section is a little confusing to navigate at first, but if you experiment for a little bit you get the hang of it pretty quickly. From here, you can edit leagues, teams, players, as well as obviously run games. Unfortunately though, MaxFB fails to provide much more than this when it comes to league gameplay. There is no money or contract system to speak of, so for the armchair General Managers out there, unfortunately MaxFB is probably not for you. This is actually quite disappointing, as a 3D based gridiron game with a realistic emphasis on the financial dealings of a football team is sorely needed in this genre. On top of this, while there is a player draft, this acts the role of free agency and the rookie draft, which again won't appeal to the team management enthusiasts out there who want realism. At the very least though, MaxFB's Leagues are in a "career" mode, meaning players progress, age and retire.