Through the years, Madden NFL has had a varying personality when it comes to progress in its gameplay. In the early days, it rode its success on stats, highlighting really good players, and delivering some fun co-op gameplay. Those were the 90s, and they were simple/fun. When the world of 3D gameplay arrived, things began to change dramatically. Madden did its best to adjust, sometimes not its best, and found itself in new territory having to rely on gimmicks to drive interest rather than well-thought-through gameplay. The QB cone was my favorite. I saw someone break a chair because of it. Best day ever.
At some point, probably around the time when EA had to seal the deal with the NFL to fend off 2K and become the sole licensee of NFL games for over a decade, a shrewd move that put more pressure on it than most might believe, it started to figure out that going back to the basics to make a fantastic football experience might be the best route to go with keeping the franchise alive. The devs at EA Tiburon stripped away all the unnecessary hoopla and went back to bringing the gamer a better gameplay experience. For the most part, I think they achieved that goal. Then Madden NFL 22 arrived.
It was not well received, and rightfully so with its clunky behavior and other problems. Last year’s game brought its own clunkiness and put more focus on the career, franchise, and ultimate team. The GUI was terrible, but the gameplay wasn’t horrible. This year’s Madden? I hate to tell you this, folks, but it brings the same clunkiness with it again, though it does a great job in some areas.
Madden NFL 24 has a wonderful franchise mode with mostly good improvements, sans an injury bug component that wants to see entire teams go to scrubs. It also brings a solid ultimate team…when it works. As for career mode, while it might look like it’s straight from the early days of the PlayStation 4, it still has enough ‘oomph’ to make it a wonderfully enriching experience.
So, get on your favorite team jersey, pray to the Gods that baseball never rears its head again until March, and let’s talk about how the Browns are going to disappoint…err…let’s talk about Madden NFL 24.
Improved on the field
Madden NFL 24 is like what it was last year. When you’re playing the game on-field and uninterrupted by instructions, then you’re going to be in heaven for good design reasons. While there are some huge hiccups in this game with regard to UI and online access, which we will get into later, it does a great job with gameplay.
Franchise
The game finally feels balanced in franchise mode! It feels like your defense, running, and passing have an equal chance of success. After years of being oh-so-close to balanced gameplay, I think this might be the closest it has been to getting it right in the series. It’s certainly my favorite part of the overall experience and something I will return to should my Browns do anything worth talking about this year. I’m hopeful but cautious. Anyway, in Madden this year, my Cleveland Browns team had a strong running game, great passing, and a solid defense. Nothing felt like it was out of line or wasn’t as strong as the other pieces. It felt like a football game should feel – evenly balanced.
In past years, I have always faltered on one side of the ball or the other. I have always written it up as my lack of talent, but this year’s game, much like last year’s game, brought a more even playing field. Taking a page from the FIFA (or whatever it is called) series, the Franchise mode is more arcade than anything else. Don’t get me wrong, you can get into the weeds with the mode, but for the most part, the gameplay is just simple and entertaining. It does its best job not to work against you and allows the gameplay to flow well. For example, the play calling from the coaches in this mode was solid and followed along the strengths of the players, a simple concept that should always be consistent every year, and it felt like I wasn’t straying too far in the wrong direction when playing the game. It felt like it should have felt, and what it felt like last year – easy-peasy, almost arcade-like. Going up for a catch, deflecting or intercepting a ball, or finding a hole in the defensive line to drive Nick Chubbs right through was more available and easier to pull off than usual. It made Franchise mode so welcoming. I’m a huge fan of this mode and it oozes with traditional Madden NFL game expectations. I always like emulating the Browns’ season and it does a good job of it, even when my Browns don’t.
If you’re more of a player who enjoys the nitty-grittiness of the game, then the Franchise mode goes a bit deeper. More trade slots, more in-depth contracts to juggle, and just more of what was established in last year’s game. It can be as complicated as you want it to be, or not. You can still have in-depth weekly strategies, hold training camps and exercises before the game, and really feel like you’re preparing for a week-to-week game. While I’m not a huge fan of diving too deeply into this side of Madden, I know people who love getting lost in these weeds. It does a good job of making the Franchise mode a bit more worthwhile in its journey and certainly more diverse in what it delivers with deep content.
Superstar
I love the entire concept of building a player up from scratch and watching them succeed. It is what drives me back to games like MLB The Show and this series. The groundwork for this is role-playing game-based, which surprisingly works. I don’t know which sports series discovered and implemented this first, but I’m very glad it’s in nearly every sports game.
Sentiments aside, this mode adds some much-needed depth by including combine levels to the Superstar mode and easing up on the narrative so that it doesn’t feel like a visual novel. I like a good story, even with Rob Schneider involved, but I’d rather be playing a sports game than watching it. Anyway, the game features minor narrative shifts with dialogue choices that make for another intriguing career mode in this year’s Madden game. Again, it’s not overwhelming, it is just enough to make you feel like you’re building someone’s life in the NFL. Superstar is a wonderful mode this year, as it has been for the last few Madden titles.
The only big gripe with this mode is the visuals. They are terrible. They are last gen and early last gen. We’ll discuss this later.
Moving on!
Needs more work
Franchise and Superstar are fun modes. I think they have improved over the last year and have focused on tinier details to make a better overall experience. Those modes alone will fill my fancy full of fun should I revisit this game repeatedly this year. But I’m an uncomplicated fool who enjoys the simpler things in Madden NFL life, so I know that these two modes are not the focus of many fans of the series. People don’t buy Madden NFL anymore to play out seasons. The focus nowadays falls on Ultimate Team.
Before we break down each section, let me get this gripe out that I experienced more than once this week. Ultimate Team is tied to EA servers, which means when the servers are down, overloaded, or simply unavailable, you will have certain pieces and parts of UT that are also unavailable. I shouldn’t be playing an MMO-football game that depends on server functionality to fully enjoy. There is so much at risk doing that, but EA chose this route to go. So, there were a few times this week when EA Servers was unavailable which meant I couldn’t play the game. That concept, outside of purely online, must be re-tooled. The world is seasoned enough to know when online servers are down and playing your friend Pete across the street will have to wait. When I want to play UT and specifically play solo matches but can’t due to EA Servers being down, that can’t be a thing. This is my biggest gripe with the UT mode.
On that note, let’s break down some Ultimate Team pieces and parts.
Ultimate Team
Ultimate Team has some strong pieces within it. They are as follows:
Challenges
If you have never played these in the series before, they are akin to MLB The Show challenges, where you’re given a situation and you must pass it successfully with certain caveats attached to it. They are typically short, and quick stints of gameplay that are great to nibble on when you’re not looking to commit to a game for 60 minutes.
Challenges in Madden NFL 24 might ask you things like keeping an offense from gaining X number of yards. They might ask you to gain a certain amount of yardage in X amount of tries. Regardless of the challenge, nothing is too difficult, even when you set the difficulty up high. Again, the challenges in UT are short stints of fun when they are working correctly, and don’t take much thought.
The sub-modes of challenges in UT are broken into the following categories:
Legends – Legends of the game give you challenges to complete. It’s as simple as that, or as complicated as it can be at times. For example, Richard Sherman put together the challenges this week. Most of what he requests the player to do is to stop the Broncos from scoring or gaining X number of yards. Not a difficult request, but it is driven by a variety of choices and changes weekly. Ultimately, it’s just a series of challenges based on specific teams and players.
Headliners — You’re given a headline for that specific week for a player. For example, this week Isiah Likely on the Ravens had 8 catches and 103 yards. You’re tasked with scoring a touchdown in X number of plays. It could be Likely completing the challenge, which I think would be far more interesting, or it could be to someone else. Much like Legends, this is simply challenges with specific headlines attached to them, but nonetheless the same gameplay design type.
Headliners Forge – This isn’t too different than the above challenges. The biggest difference is that it’s basically one challenge that keeps building up and up. For example, if the game asks you to rush for 40 yards, then the next challenge will be 50 yards. I don’t know why they named it the same, but it works. It might be the most different mode from the bunch.
Ultimate Preseason – Honestly, more of the same as the other modes, but with a bit more hodgepodge rather than consistency.
Outside of Legends, which is just essentially like the other challenge modes, there’s not a helluva lot of difference between these challenge modes, beyond rewards. That’s not a terrible thing, but I wish there was a bit more variety. It just feels like there are more description differences than actual gameplay differences. Regardless, they’re still fun to play and complete. There’s nothing more motivating than a star-based reward system that equals points and leveling at the end. It’s that mini-RPG backbone at work.
Solo Battles
This is exactly what it sounds like, solo games. These are weekly events where you can go head-to-head with CPU-driven opponents, though from what I could tell, the CPU opponents are cards from actual players. You’re not playing actual people, but the simulation is there. Anyway, for someone like me, who absolutely hates playing human beings online that live and breathe this series, this is a formidable option. In the first game, I went head-to-head against another CPU-driven UT team and took them down with ease. It was a full-length game with my best UT players. Again, easy-peasy.
The easy part in the equation is important because the level of difficulty in this mode goes from Rookie (me) to Legend (not me). So, the game can get incredibly rough if you put more difficulty on. The more difficulty you choose, the more rewards you receive, though, so you must balance out that risk/reward. Those rewards come in the form of cards or MUT coins. Regardless of difficulty, Solo mode is a fun mode and works within the confines of UT.
Head-to-head
Could not compete. COULD. NOT. COMPETE. Did terribly. If you enjoy online play, go for it.
House Rules
These are like the challenges but they’re more restrictive and you’re playing real people. The positive is that you don’t have to go through an entire game. You’re only playing it in pieces. It wasn’t as competitive or nasty as head-to-head.
The other pieces and parts of UT are MUT Draft, Play a Friend and Practice. You can figure those out on your own. Anyway, this year’s game checks all the boxes for what a UT experience should be, but it doesn’t really do anything particularly special. It feels like the same routine as every Ultimate Team, and in some respects just has a fair number of repeating elements in each mode to keep you feeling like there is something different going on. This is something akin to your spouse cooking a wonderful dinner and nearly every item was stuffed with stuffing. Sure, it’s nice to have stuffing but that dumbs down the uniqueness of each meal. Stuffing is delicious but just in small quantities and with specific recipes.
As much as I had fun, I could see hardcore fans of this series just not seeing anything special here with UT. They’re probably going to play it repeatedly, and something needs to change with UT at some point to make it more enjoyable. It can be fun but it simply does not come with a good variety of ways to play it.
Let’s shift gears and talk presentation.
Presentation – a tale of two halves
Every year, the devs at EA Tiburon look like they’re making significant progress in visuals with on-field graphics and overall presentation (crowd, commentators, players, environments) but then the career mode reminds me that they must dumb it down a bit when it comes to cutscenes because the game still is available on last generation consoles. We are at the point where the cutscenes in the career mode are hitting on early PlayStation 4 graphics. They contain dead faces, glumpy hair, and those eyes…my God, those eyes are haunting in the cutscenes. The point here is that somewhere soon down the road this has got to go. It’s abysmal to look at and I understand that EA must cover various platforms but at some point, you must let go or have two different development teams covering each platform (last and new). The latter probably won’t happen because of budgets, but something needs to change.
Now, having said that I love what EA Tiburon did with the on-field graphics. They have progressively made me feel like the game is more and more alive with each new version of it. If you look at where this series journeyed from and where it is now with on-field visuals, the progress is amazing.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
While Madden NFL 24 is better than last year’s release, there are still some glaring shortcomings that hurt it, specifically with UI clunkiness, game mode access at times, and repetitiveness.
