Without an official NFL license, Midway took matters into their own hands. Instead of canceling their football game, they decided to take their Blitz franchise to the extreme. By adding a scriptwriter from the Playmakers TV series and adding injuries, prostitutes and swearing, you would think you would have a pretty good game.

Unfortunately this isn’t the case with Blitz: The League. All of the new features are great, but there is one major problem: it’s still the same Blitz engine from prior games. This means the AI is poor, all of the money plays are there and the horrible cheat logic is also here.

When you fire up the game, you have a few options. You can choose "quick play," which allows you to play a 1 or 2 player game. This is the only mode where you can select cheats such as turning off injuries, difficulty (3 levels) and the length of a quarter (between 1-5 minutes).

The meat of the game is in campaign mode. In this mode, you are treated to a video of your team being relegated to Division 3. (This football is more like soccer where there is promotion and relegation.) The owner has cleared house and has negotiated a deal with the mayor to fund a new stadium if his team wins the Division 1 championship.

You select your players, team name, colors, doctor, and coaches. You also select the type of stadium you’ll play in. The customization here is very impressive. You then select which players to train and what training they have. You are limited to three players per type of training. It makes it easy to choose who gets kicking training, but you have to choose wisely between wide receivers and running backs – you have a limited amount of training to get that speed bonus.

There are other ways you can increase performance – such as the drug option. The higher the cost of the drug, the bigger the performance bonus – but there is usually a catch and that is the player is either more susceptible to injury or doesn't have as much field vision as they would if they were, um…sober?

Finally you can purchase equipment that will help your performance as well. The difference with equipment versus the drugs is that equipment helps the entire team instead of one individual.

Now it's onto week 1 of the campaign. You'll receive various mail messages which will give you added incentive for that week's game…such as get a bonus if you get 100 yards passing, the doctor has found a new drug, or should we buy prostitutes to hurt the opponents performance. Yes, you heard me. You are even shown a video of the ladies of the evening visiting the opponent’s hotel. Sounds very mature rated, but hot coffee this isn't and the tantalizing ladies seem to be more WWE-esque (lots of tease, no payoff) than anything else.

After all that, we can finally start playing the game. During one or two games you’ll see a video..maybe your team star player flirting with a cheerleader, for example. You’ll then see the kickoff. If you’re kicking, you are treated to a mini game of Simon in order to kick off. You’ll have to press buttons randomly in order to inflate your kick meter (Y,Y,B,A,B this time). If you press the buttons in order at the right time, you’ll hit a great kick. Each button miss costs you 20% or so of your kick meter.

From here on in, it’s the Blitz game you remember with a few added touches. There’s still Turbo, but there’s a new feature – Clash Mode. Clash mode gives you a sort of ‘bullet time’ that allows you to easily move around defenders. You have a limited supply of both Clash and Turbo – until the next play when most of it comes back.