Introduction

There is a certain ritual to Australian rules football games: the promise of a faithful pitch, the intoxicating thump of leather on boot, and the hope that the software will not reduce an entire season to a slideshow. AFL 26 arrives as the latest attempt by Big Ant Studios - their second consecutive outing with Nacon at the helm - to capture the chaos and poetry of the AFL. Announced in an almost farcical fashion after a leak on the Australian Classification Board's website in early April 2025 and formally unveiled the same day on Twitter, AFL 26 was released across current platforms, including PlayStation 5, on 8 May 2025. Expectations were mixed at best; the series' previous entry, AFL 23, had set a low bar with a bug-laden launch that became the sort of cautionary tale magazines printed when they still had pages to tear out and throw at strangers. The hopeful headline here is simple: it ships on time. The more sobering headline is that shipping does not cure poor execution.

Gameplay

If you read only the facts that Big Ant and Nacon allowed to leak into the public record, AFL 26 is a sports title built around Australian rules football with both single-player and multiplayer modes. Those are not small features; they are the very foundation of any respectable footy game. The documentation supplied to reviewers and the subsequent community testing, however, reveal that the foundations are shakier than the marketing would have you believe. From a 1990s critic's perspective - the era in which one judged a sports title on whether it felt like the real thing and whether the controller behaved like an honest referee - AFL 26 is a mixed bag. The essentials of the sport are present: tackling, marking, passing and the positional scramble that defines a match. The game attempts to model the flow of an AFL contest, but many of these systems feel half-implemented. The series has always tried to be authentic for fans, and that intention is visible, but intent does not equal polish. Multiplayer and single-player make the necessary appearances, but reports and early user feedback point to a troubling prevalence of bugs. On release the Steam community showed a strikingly low approval rate - around one-third positive - and that verdict is revealing. Compared to AFL 23, AFL 26 does not appear to be afflicted by as many outright game-breaking flaws; there are fewer monumental crashes that rendered the title unusable from the outset. That is welcome. Yet the game still arrives with enough glitches and stability issues that the playing experience becomes an endurance test. Perhaps most damning was a platform-specific problem that prevented some Xbox users from launching the game at all. If a title cannot reliably run on a platform it promises to support, a reviewer must ask whether its quality assurance process was actually a QA or merely a quick tour through a checklist. There is little in the way of novelty here. This entry reads like a conservative sequel that chose continuity over bold change - a safe play that regrettably highlights the series' inability to climb out of a rut. For players who are die-hard AFL fans, that might not be the end of the world. The core mechanics will be recognizable, and the multiplayer still allows for the occasional moment of brilliance when a sequence comes together and the virtual ball finds its way to virtual hands. But moments are not a game. The overall package needs consistency, and that is where AFL 26 is at its weakest. The development saga is worth a footnote: the leak, the same-day announcement, and the game hitting store listings with its cover art all make AFL 26 feel less like a crafted product and more like a hurried schedule item. Big Ant's relationship with Nacon appears steady - this is their second collaboration in the series - but a steady partnership must still deliver steady quality. At release, that steadiness was not apparent, and players were left waiting for patches instead of the polished seasonal experience older reviewers used to demand from the shelf.

Graphics

The original documentation does not supply a blow-by-blow of visual fidelity, which forces a reviewer into the only honest path left: observing what is present and holding it against reasonable expectations for a PlayStation 5 title. AFL 26 is competent when it comes to the basics of player models and stadium architecture. Uniforms are serviceable and the crowds sit where crowds should sit. There is an effort to present the spectacle of an AFL match, and on PS5 the title has enough horsepower to render the field and its actors without the dreadful compromises of last-generation ports. Yet 'competent' is not a term that inspires excitement. Textures and animations sometimes lack the fluidity one would hope for in 2025; certain motions are stilted, and the transitions between actions can be clunky. When the game does animate cleanly, it is enjoyable - those moments are reminders that the engine can deliver - but they are too sporadic to create a coherent visual identity. Visual bugs, while reportedly less catastrophic than the code-level disasters of prior entries, still showed up frequently in community reports. The net result is a game that looks like it belongs on a modern console but acts like it is still tuning the drivers in the background. A review from the 1990s would have drawn a comparison to the physical manuals and glossy screenshots tucked into CD sleeves; in that spirit, AFL 26's visuals are like a glossy cover shot hiding an inside spread that has been printed with a paper jam halfway through. The promise of the hardware is there, but the finishing passes and attention to detail are missing.

Conclusion

If you are a collector of footy games or a fan desperate to play anything that carries the AFL name, AFL 26 is not without merit. Big Ant Studios has preserved the skeleton of Australian rules football and delivered an experience that, in short bursts, can resemble the sport in its more glorious moments. For everyone else - and for the critical eye that remembers a time when patches were a rare afterthought rather than a launch-day expectation - the game is a disappointment. This is a title that arrived on time but not fully ready. Compared to the notorious calamity of AFL 23, AFL 26 is a quieter failure: fewer planetary explosions, more persistent nagging problems. The Steam reception (roughly one in three positive reviews) reflects the gulf between intention and delivery. Platform-specific issues that blocked Xbox players underscore a lack of rigorous testing across hardware targets. On PlayStation 5 the game is playable and occasionally rewarding, but it is hampered by bugs, uneven animations and a general sense that the polish was promised, then postponed. As a serious 1990s reviewer might have put it: the fundamentals are there, but the craft has been outsourced to a later patch. For an experience that should celebrate one of Australia's great sporting spectacles, AFL 26 feels like a rehearsal recorded on the wrong tape. Buy it only if you are willing to tolerate rough edges and wait for the developers to chase down the remainder of the issues. For everyone else, wait for the patches - and for the next entry, perhaps a little more patience and a little less leaking would do wonders.

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