From: EA Sports For: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PC
★★★★
That infernal kicking gauge.
This is a very niche opening to a review so please bear with me as I outline my one hyper-specific complaint about a game that is still basically great but is starting to divide the virtual sports community.
NFL teams have kickers, you see. They kick for goal, either for a point after a touchdown or for two points from a field goal.
Madden, the game that might be even more famous than the sports league it recreates, uses a button-press mechanic to set power and accuracy for your wee man on the screen as he kicks for goal.
And ... (deep breath) it is still broken after all these years.
Seriously, it must be five or six years now since there have been problems with this mechanism. Every six or seven kicks, it lags, and puts about 10% power on the kick so the ball bobbles just a few yards ahead of the kicker.
A "minor" issue, sure, but perhaps emblematic of a game that now seems to get way more attention for its failings than its many extraordinary attributes.
Bad reviews now flood the online cesspool — the average user review of the PS5 version, which I play, on the Metacritic website is a shocking 1.4 (out of 10) — as people pick holes in the game.
Their faults are, broadly, my faults.
The game has barely changed in years. Bugs and glitches are still frequent, especially in the early weeks before the big patches land. Many of the menus have extremely annoying lag. And some of the game AI, even for those of us who enjoy the NFL but don’t know all that much about the real inner workings of the on-field action, is highly dubious.
But there is also a danger in letting the niggles overpower the basic experience of playing Madden, which is still all sorts of fun.
The gameplay is mostly smooth, the recreation of the NFL on and off the field is astonishing, the sliders and options give you immense control over your experience, and all the usual modes offer plenty of playability.
Some tweaks — to defend against those who claim Madden is just a yearly roster update — include a tool called FieldSense, a gameplay system designed to give you more control over individual players and how they play the game. This is particularly useful, for example, when playing as the quarterback and wanting to determine exactly where to pass.
New animations do a reasonable job at making the action feel like it’s not scripted or canned, while new trade tools are heaven for the franchise geeks.
I’m enjoying Madden 23 as much as I enjoyed Madden 22 (and 21, 20 ...). A vastly different experience? No. A perfect game? No. But don’t let the odd bum note detract from overall brilliance.
Nice to see the legend John Madden himself on the cover, too. Thanks coach.
