On playing the game, this indeed appears to be true, but it's still weird - it clearly isn't a better game engine (better than Madden '93? I think not, and EA aren't claiming otherwise), and it isn't the same, so you come to the inevitable conclusion that they've deliberately gone out and written a game worse than their biggest star performer. It's not a very inspiring start, then, but luckily Mutant League Football still manages to come out smiling. Why? The answer's obvious to anyone who bought Splatterhouse 2 - when gameplay lets you down, turn to Extreme Violence...

So what's the idea here? Well, Mutant League Football is John Madden's Speedball 2. Essentially you're playing good old American Football, but without all those tedious picky rules about not being allowed to kill your opponents. Nope, in this game you're positively encouraged to smash the other teams into sticky piles of bones. Indeed, there are many plays which don't aim to get the ball forward at all - they're only there to maim, wound and slaughter the opposing players. It's great fun, although a bit pointless - you don't get points for enemy deaths like you do in Speedball 2, and there are always plenty of reserves for the other team to call up if you do total their quarterback.

So far so good, then, but the actual football game lets the side down a bit. I've played a LOT of John Madden's, and I'm not bad, but I still don't expect to load up a new game, play it for the first time (admittedly at the easiest level) without so much as the briefest of glances at the instruction manual, and rack up an 85-0 victory in a 2-minutes-a-quarter game with plays selected completely at random. It doesn't get very much better as you go on, either - American Football is, if we're being honest, really just an elaborate version of Stone, Paper, Scissors, and while a game like Madden's overcomes that by giving the player the impression of total control over the action, Mutant League Football, simply, doesn't.

Playing defense in particular, your team will effectively stop the opposition on anything but the highest difficulty levels without any intervention on your part, at least 70% of the time. And on the higher difficulty levels (the game's teams each have one of six skill levels, so the hardest game you can play is you as a no-star team against a five-star Mega Drive squad), all the intervention you can muster won't do you much good, as the computer players are so comprehensively smarter and tougher than yours.

Still, since when was American footy supposed to be played as a one-player game? Even Madden's isn't much cop solo, so it's a bit much to expect a classic from Mutant League in that area. And indeed, things do improve dramatically in two-player mode, as the game's genuinely funny humour adds real edge to the competitiveness of the proceedings. And while it would have been nicer for each team and player to have an individual personality (you quite often get exactly the same comments about your opposition when you're the coach of several different sides), it's still a laugh.

So where does this all leave us, then? Well, obviously, EA haven't written a Madden-beater (be a pretty stupid idea if they had). This single fact leaves Mutant League Football is a bit of an unfortunate position - it's not honestly different enough to justify buying it AND John Madden, and if you're only going to buy one American Football game for your Mega Drive, it's not going to be this one. So who's it going to sell to, exactly? But then, that's not my problem. My problem is how to mark a game that I actually enjoyed playing, but couldn't in all conscience tell you to go out and spend £40 on. I think at the end of the day, it's going to have to be a pretty middling kind of mark, but with the proviso that the game taken in it's own right is really worth a bit more. It's just that, looking at what it's got to compete with, it can't.

GRAPHICS 8

SOUND 7

GAMEPLAY 6

GAME SIZE 5

ADDICTION 7

A good laugh in two-player mode, and a decent enough game really, but Madden's still the king by a long, long way.

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