3/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of EA SPORTS™ Madden NFL 25.

As a kid, I bought Madden every year. I'd get it at the midnight release at GameStop or I'd go out first thing in the morning on release day. But over the years the Madden franchise has taken a well documented turn for the worse. A complete nosedive into mediocrity and microtransaction hell. A featureless, soulless shit pit of a game. Still, it's nearly your only option for pro football in gaming. Certainly the only one with any money behind it. So once every few years I check in when an edition goes on sale. I'm pleasantly surprised that Madden 25 at least feels functional. It's playable. There's some neat stuff in here. And to be honest, the game as a whole plays better than its college football counterpart whose roaring return after a decade's absence turned out to be more of a mewling return. Madden is as polished as ever. The presentation dwarfs CFB's threadbare flourishes. News stories work and are more interesting, incoming college players get narrative stories, the in-game presentation shows what's happening in other games and stories from around the league in franchise mode. It's altogether much more engaging and immersive than CFB25, which is depressingly sterile at times. There's just much more depth to Madden's franchise and superstar modes compared to the thinness of CFB. The gameplay is largely quite similar between the two games. CFB plays a little faster and has more variety in the option game. Madden far better resembles pro football. Super Simmed games are very entertaining and often realistic feeling in Madden, which is quite nice because I found the speed of play really breaks the AI in CFB25. There's still a lot of stupid shit, missing features and glitches though. The biggest sin is how god awful slow and laggy nearly the entire game is. The menus take tens of seconds to load and change. Sometimes popping in slowly as it goes. Nearly everything has seconds on seconds of delay. And in a franchise mode with a reasonable amount of weekly tasks (like weekly practices) the delays compound into something that begins to feel a bit arduous to play. It's sluggish and slogging. Then there's glitches and silliness abound. The news stories are better but the interface is terrible with a lack of filtering and one scrolling location that doesn't even go back to the start of the league year. It's a far cry from the newspapers or cellphones of Madden's gone-by. The player cards are buried underneath three clicks instead of the classic single R3 push. And the career stats on player cards don't even total, requiring you to visit an entirely different menu to check them. There's no way to check player morale en masse, it has to be looked at one-by-one despite morale being a major advertised mechanic for this season. Even with shareable playbooks and a common download center, you still can't use custom playbooks in franchise mode. You can use them in any game you play. But you can't set them in the menus to utilize formation subs. Auto Subs also seem to continue to not work, a problem for a literal decade now. Sim logic is still busted. You'll see your team give up 80 yard 10 play scoring drives that only take 15 seconds off the game clock. Teams will be trailing by 5, and kick a field goal as time expires to lose by 2 instead of attempting to score a game winning touchdown. Teams will inexplicably go for 2 or go for it on fourth down in baffling scenarios. The same errors plague CFB25 and seem to be just as present in Madden. Several of these alleviate if you sim on 'slow' (i.e. watching every play) but then you're not really getting the benefit of speed that comes from simming. This makes Superstar mode particularly unbearable. Injuries seem absolutely bananas. Without fail I lose three or four starters to season ending injuries within the first three weeks every year. With the additions of fatigue and practice injuries you'd expect the game to better emulate real life injuries and niggles. But instead the game just can't parse it well and you end up with players either 100% healthy or 100% out of the game and you get injuries of comical length. Which, fair play. Injuries happen all the time in real life and that's just what you need to adjust to. But in Madden the injuries often feel out of step with the way they occur in real life and they're still maintained as too much of a binary (hurt/healthy) compared to other sports games like NBA 2k or Football Manager. My first franchise was with the Giants. I fired Brian Daboll and hired a recently shitcanned Mike Tomlin. But about 50% of the time when the game pans over to the sidelines to show my coach they're showing Brian Daboll instead of Mike Tomlin. Very immersion breaking. Similar immersion breaking glitches occur elsewhere, like when I lost 52-14 to the Jets and Mike Tirico remarks at the close of the game "it always stings to lose such a close game." Was it close, Mike? Similarly, I shellacked the Eagles by a similar score and my quarterback was something like 35 of 40. I throw an incomplete pass late in the game and we get Greg Olsen talking about how much we've struggled in the passing game today. I've thrown for 5 touchdowns and lead Philly 42-7. But sure, let's talk about our troubles passing. There's a variety of major animation glitches, errors and immersion breakers in gameplay too. I appreciate no one really wants a purely physics based sports game (see: Football Simulator) but Madden often suffers from some of the worst animations in sports gaming. One painful example is that when a runner enters a 'broken tackle' animation they can't be tackled by other tacklers. The other tacklers simply bounce off the runner as if the runner is within an impervious bubble until the 'broken tackle' animation finishes. Quarterbacks still fumble at an alarming rate, which is supposed to act as a counter to running QB success, something Madden has never adequately addressed. Even with 99 carry stat, quarterbacks will fumble double digit times in a season. Lamar Jackson's career high in fumbles, both lost and recovered, both strip sacks and lost fumbles while rushing, is 12. You'll be near enough 20 in Madden over a full season. Corners still have a bizarre sixth sense about where the ball is. Making highly unnatural superhero plays to knock passes down or intercept balls. I understand this is to help keep the game balanced and oftentimes stats will still sim out to something that looks normal. But it still feels awful to watch a corner not facing the ball, leap into the air and windmill backhand a ball that is behind their back. Long gone are the 50 foot jumps from linebackers in the middle of the field for interceptions, but they've been replaced by ball hawking safeties that always have an incredible break on the ball in every situation. But Madden is Madden. So all of this is alleviated by the fact in any given year there's 5 or so plays that are entirely busted and lead to touchdowns or significant gains on virtually every snap. Abuse them at will and you'll still win games by five scores on All-Madden. Using Joe Flacco at quarterback, after a disappointing injury to my starting QB, I was able to hang 50+ on the Bengals with ease using the cheesier plays. A reminder that for immersive sim experiences in Madden you need a significant number of house rules to keep the game believable. In the end I've mostly settled on forcing myself to make the most of what exists in Franchise and watching the games play out on Super Sim with the commentary muted. I play music or podcasts or something instead, because the commentary is miserably bad and frequently inaccurate. I take over control of Super Sim at key moments to keep the AI from going insane, but otherwise I'm content to treat it like coach mode. The AI is too easy to beat and fool with cheese plays, and far too erratic to treat it like a sophisticated and realistic opponent. They'll bite on play actions on 3rd & 50 but then they'll execute a perfect blitz sending the house on 3rd & 4, overwhelming your line and sacking you milliseconds after the snap. Much easier to just watch the game play itself and pop in here and there to keep it on track. I won't touch the online modes. They're terrible and predatory. They're no better this year than any other year and Madden online is infinitely less fun and polished than its NBA 2k competitor. Which is also predatory garbage. Superstar is fun but it's an absolute aberration that you can only play one of six positions when for a decade you could play as any position on the field. Another pitiful example of EA ripping away perfectly good features and replacing it with nothing but more Ultimate Team packs to extract money from tweens and their parents. But this is one of Madden's better showings since they left the 360/PS3. The game is very pretty. Franchise is deeper and more immersive than its been in years, and it's miles ahead of the CFB product. Some of the more shocking issues from years past have been addressed but there's still more fat than meat on this bone. Madden still pales in comparison to the features that existed in Madden 08 just like CFB 25 paled in comparison to the features that were in NCA 14. EA will continue to give you less and ask for more. My conclusion is that when we jump to the PS6, EA will tear out the small feature advancements they've provided to us here and leave us with a barebones pile of shit again. But in the meantime I'll be grateful that there's a functioning and mostly entertaining arcade-sim AAAA football game. Happy I got it for $20 though.