Another year, another Madden NFL. This year, EA Tiburon and EA Sports have a lot to redeem from last year’s Madden game, one that not only honors the dedication that fans put into this football experience but also honors and celebrates the life of a man that made this football game a brand name. Does it honor both? It certainly honors John Madden in all the right ways. As for the gameplay, it is better than last year’s glitchy mess, but it still suffers from a menu system that desires to disrupt the flow of the gameplay in some modes. I know, a menu, right? It happens.
Let’s talk about it.
Better game, better experience
As I have stated in the last few years with the Madden NFL games, the developers at EA Tiburon have worked on backend items to improve the gameplay experience. The decisions for the most part have paid off, especially in this year’s Madden game. The first and most important improvement is the FieldSENSE gameplay system.
The FieldSENSE gameplay system concentrates on bringing the most comfortable football experience for all types of players. This new addition to Madden makes the game feel good. What you have been training your muscle memory to expect in Madden is what this new gameplay system delivers. I think I have more naturally thrown, caught, and intercepted the ball in this year’s Madden game more than any other year. Going toe-to-toe with receivers and hitting the right buttons at the right time equals the correct results and it feels like it makes the game flow better. To be quite honest, before I even read up on anything related to the gameplay system, the game just felt like it played better. After reading and understanding what the gameplay system brings to the table, it was easy to see why I felt this way. It just makes the game more accessible to those who are casual players while still challenging the hardcore players. It’s a great system that works as advertised. It’s the silent bells and whistles in the background that you don’t know exists until you start playing the game and enjoying it. It made a huge difference with the entertainment factor of this year’s title.
Another fantastic experience this year is Face of the Franchise: The League. While the skeleton of this isn’t quite as in-depth as the last few years, taking a college kid to the NFL, still brings a lot of fun features to the process of getting better in the league. The mode starts you as a veteran player who is on the downslide. You essentially get to build him back up and make certain decisions to try to grow the player to level 99. The building process consists of off-the-field decisions, such as helping your community or your teammates out, and several locker room and on-field decisions. The game gives you goals to achieve in each game, provides you with side activities in-between games (weightlifting, practicing, etc.), and allows you to customize your player’s strengths with a simple skills tree. I think I spent the most time in this mode and I’m still enjoying growing my QB, John Madden (I didn’t change his name, it felt wrong). It’s a fun mode and it flows very well from game to game. In one single day, I played eight games in this mode. It was quick and it just worked.
Now, that said, the one issue I have with this mode is how glitchy the camera is during gameplay, specifically during the hiking phase (or at least this phase with me). The locked camera view just doesn’t look like it can find comfort in its placement, as you will get janky frame movements before you hike the ball. You will find that the camera will jump from one side of the QB to the other in a split second, which is disruptive when you’re trying to focus on hiking. The remedy is to zoom out and look at routes, but that shouldn’t be a requirement. Is it game-breaking? Not at all, but it’s annoying as hell. This is the only place I found the camera glitch happening and it’s more visually displeasing than anything else. It doesn’t affect the gameplay one bit, but it does seem like one of those things EA Tiburon could have smoothed out before releasing the game.
Beyond FotF, the other strong mode in the game is Franchise. It’s just your everyday season mode that pretty much allows you to tweak every aspect of your gameplay. From coaches to the roster, you’ve got almost complete control over how everyone grows and proceeds. For hardcore folks, there is a scouting college players option, which I didn’t really get into at all. I think anyone who enjoys looking at prospects and going that deep into the football process will enjoy it. Simply put, I just want to play a season in this mode. This mode is always a ‘season’ mode for me. It gets me in the mood for football in the fall, and it still works despite my own personal protest over my beloved Browns this year. And yes, for those who want to dive deep into the contract process, you get to juggle that this year as well. It’s fun, but most of the entertainment here is just playing a season with your favorite team. For that, this mode works well.
The reason why most fans have stuck with Madden NFL over the more recent years is the Ultimate Team mode. I have always admired the concept of this mode and I can see how people can get hooked putting together the ultimate team in the game, but it’s a bit glitchy when it comes to menus and flow. I know, that sounds petty to complain about that aspect of this mode before even getting into the actual gameplay discussion, but the menus are frustrating. Sometimes they disappear, sometimes they take a while to load, and other times some graphics are just sitting small in the background waiting for you to move the thumbstick before becoming active. It’s just bad menu architecture that truthfully seems to struggle to work. The menu system of this game seems to be disjointed in some areas and working smoothly in others. I’m not sure where the disconnect was during the development process, but I hope that EA Tiburon gets it worked out soon with an update. They had this issue last year and it just made the game janky to play at times. Thankfully, it only interrupts the flow, not the actual gameplay.
Now, if you can work through the menu system inconsistency, as I did, the Ultimate Team mode is quite fun. Pulling cards and putting together your team, going through various difficulty of challenges, and just generally having quick fun is something I can dig with this game. I know more than a few gamers who love this mode year-in and year-out, and they will more than likely still dig it. It works well and it’s still delightfully addictive when the menus aren’t getting in the way. Anyway, the other options in this mode include Solo battles, which allow you to play against other players’ teams (this was fascinating to me), Head 2 Head modes, which include playing seasons and going up against real players with some gameplay structure involved, and then there is just playing online with friends. It all works and is fun.
In the Play with Friends mode, you get online head-2-head, as well as The Yard. I played The Yard last year and just felt like it tried too hard to be cool. I like the concept of smaller teams on a smaller field, almost AFL-esque, but it just felt like a sideshow. I know a lot of people love this mode, though, and I can respect that, as it does serve a quick and fun purpose.
Beyond the above gameplay modes, the game doesn’t have a lot else to it, which is great because simplicity rules. Fewer modes and fewer experiments mean that EA Tiburon concentrates on refining what they know already works. The FieldSENSE system is great. It feels good on both sides of the ball, and in all aspects of each. This is the first time I felt like the game was truly balanced. It just feels fun and comfortable, almost arcade-like. If that works for FIFA, that arcade feeling should work for Madden NFL. Anyway, I enjoyed the gameplay design during my review session immensely. And thankfully, I didn’t run into crashes or glitches that affected the gameplay on the field. The menu system needs smoothing out badly, as does that janky camera in Face of the Franchise.
Graphically, it’s getting there
Every year, Madden NFL gets closer to perfection. That doesn’t mean that it’s near it, but it means that the game is heading in the right direction. This year, EA Tiburon hinted that they worked on better body collision, and I can say that they achieved better contact. The game seemed to do a great job with defensive players tackling and properly bringing down offensive players without cutting through their chest, butts, or legs. It wasn’t perfect, but it was different than in previous years. The accuracy was improved with players’ reactions to each other when it comes to the collision. The tackles and body contact looked incredibly accurate.
Now, there is also player collision avoidance, which was ever present in this year’s game. I saw my players correctly jump over opponents on the ground and fully react to the presence of other players. Hell, one of my players caught a touchdown and jumped over a press member in the endzone. It doesn’t seem impressive until you realize that something like that probably hasn’t happened in a Madden game before. I certainly have never seen that in all my years playing and honestly, it’s a testament to EA Tiburon’s improvement on collision. It was cool, even though it really didn’t affect the gameplay whatsoever. It did improve the realism.
As for the player models and environments, they’re much better this year. No dead eyes, no weird-looking teeth/mouths – all of everything looked great. It was a jump up from Madden NFL 22. I appreciated the graphic details of the players, the movement of the clothing, and the compression the jerseys undergo with player movement. I was also incredibly impressed with environments. They were better looking, loud, and just engrossing. They built upon the atmosphere of the gameplay, which is better than taking it away. As for the fans…they need improvement. They still haven’t left the PlayStation 3 or 4 days. Also, the cutscenes in other modes, especially the Face of the Franchise: The League need major improvement. Having played video games since the early 80s, we have reached the point where the cutscenes are no longer prettier than the gameplay, which is weird to me. Cutscenes were always the reason to get through a game, but now it is reversed, doubly so in Madden. The cutscenes in FotF were late last generation modeling. They should be progressed and close to gameplay graphics by now on the current generation of systems.
On the audio side of the tracks, I enjoyed the commentary quite a bit. I felt like the commentators had enough variety to complement the experience. Whoever wrote their script and whoever put together their reactions to on-field happenings should be commended. This was one of the cooler and brighter spots to the presentation factor. It was nicely done.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Madden NFL 23 proves that content is indeed king, as the modes included drive the experience and do a good job more than not. There are some glitches in the game, especially in some menus featured in some modes, but for the most part, the gameplay has improved considerably in this year’s title for those not to get in the way of the experience.
