Madden NFL 25

Written by Sean Cahill on 9/20/2024 for PC  

I’d be hard-pressed to find a more maligned gaming franchise than the Madden NFL Football series. It wasn’t always that way, given the series started in 1988 and gave NFL fans what they wanted, year in and year out, without much criticism. The problem is that for the last 15+ years, the franchise has felt stale. Ever since EA Sports locked in the exclusive rights after the success of ESPN NFL 2K5, fans and critics alike have panned the gaming giant for turning the series into nothing more than a roster update and adding or removing just a couple of things each year and calling it a day. Those voices have turned into outright screams, and while I think Madden 2025 is the best Madden in several years, everything comes with context.

Gameplay is fine-ish but there are still glaring issues.

I’m not going to bore you with paragraph after paragraph waxing poetic about some of the past Maddens that did the franchise proud. We’re jumping right into gameplay. After the success of College Football 25, there were hopes that maybe EA saw the errors of their ways and could make Madden feel as fun as its college counterpart. The answer to those hopes is a resounding….kind of? Let me explain.

Every year since the Frostbite Engine came out, I haven’t enjoyed it. This is the first version in a long time that I at least somewhat enjoyed the gameplay, at least for a little while. My first few games, it felt somewhat like College Football 25. That’s a good thing! The plays are somewhat similar to what’s available in CFB25, right down to the Run-Play Options (RPO) that are available in the playbooks. The formula ends up, largely, being the same: Coaches have unique playbooks to them but they can be tweaked and altered depending on how a player wants to jump in. Again, nothing new but it makes sense and works with CFB25. Why wouldn’t it work with Madden 25?

Here’s the problem: It plays slower. It took awhile for me to notice, but running plays? A little slower. Pass plays? Definitely slower. I tested this by bouncing between CFB and Madden. I don’t have a good explanation for this but everything is slower when, if anything, it should be a little faster in the pro game. The difficulty should be turned up, even on the lower levels, but difficulty in general seems inconsistent, but more on that later.

That being said, I don’t outright hate the gameplay. I think it’s fine, but the glaring issues really showed themselves when I hit the end of my review run. For example, blocking AI is an absolute mess. It didn’t matter what defense I played against or what their ratings were, the pass rush even on the lower difficulties was downright brutal. Having a mobile quarterback is almost a necessity to truly survive a full game.

The other side of that is clearly focusing on the run game! Well, the AI blocking for that might be worse. I lost count of how many times a guard or center pulled around the corner and just blew by the nearest defender to attack air. Fullbacks, while there’s only a handful of them in the NFL in general, also suffer from this. Off-tackle runs are worthless because fullbacks, even with a nearly maxed out run block rating (yes, I tested this) all seemed to just blow past defenders they would logically block. Even funnier is how this game handles HB Draws out of shotgun or pistol. Almost every snap on a draw is a high snap, like the game is programmed to ensure that it takes that little extra time to sell the draw. That isn’t an AI issue. That seemed to be running by design, and it made me stop using draw plays entirely, even though they were pretty effective. Weirdly enough, trap plays work almost perfectly! So do HB Iso runs. Same with anything in between the tackles. The run blocking AI just goes off the rails as soon as it’s outside the tackle block. It’s disappointing because these issues aren’t nearly as bad in CFB25.

Playing defense isn’t easy, but I don’t think it’s outwardly broken. The problem with defense is how it reacts overall when you’re playing against it. It’s possible to set up defenders with the slightest of moves when running. The best example is when you’ve broken free down the sideline and the defenders are setting up the angle to catch. Doing a small change of angle will force the defenders to adjust and, ultimately, slow them down because they have to make that change. Going back to the prior angle of running after that gives the edge and might mean the difference between a touchdown or not. Years ago, the first CFB and Madden on the 360 had this issue and it was corrected the next year as the mechanics were cleaned up. I’m not holding my breath on this being fixed because well into this latest generation and these issues with Frostbite have been around for awhile. Again: Disappointing.

Franchise mode feels the same again, and that is a massive problem.

This is the broken record with Madden games: The single player modes are largely glossed over because it doesn’t generate extra revenue. I don’t play Ultimate Team because I’m more interested in the simulation portion of Madden. I want to run my own franchise, build it up, and make it a juggernaut. This is the draw to the EAFC franchise, but that’s on a much grander scale. In Madden, picking one of the worst teams and taking them to Super Bowl win after Super Bowl win is the best you can do, and that’s still fun! It’s hard because of the salary cap, managing contracts, knowing when to cut or trade players…all of that is a factor. The problem is that this has been the same for years.

I wish I could accurately post what I felt when I started my franchise with the Chicago Bears and went to the team management section to see what I could learn about building a new stadium. The options presented to me are the same cookie-cutter options that have been around for at least ten years. The images themselves in the menu are even the same, maybe just at a higher resolution. I want the customization to be on different parts of the stadium (Madden had this once, but it has been gone for a very long time) to make it feel unique! Adding little quirks to how the upper and lower decks look, what kind of signage and banners are hanging on the sides, all of that? Nope, it’s still not there. You will get very few basic options and that’s it. The basic endzone looks just make me sad while the wall where the lower deck is just has Xs and Os scattered on it. It’s as generic as it gets.

The rest of franchise mode feels the same as it has been with a different UI, one that I don’t know if I’d even call cleaned up. It’s certainly new, but it also bugs out on me. Coming out of a game it will randomly be on the NFL scoreboard tab and I can’t change out of it. I have to re-load the franchise from the auto-save and then it takes me back to the main menu. The skill trees are fine and I like having them available, but they could be so much better and I barely paid attention to where I was putting points because they didn’t seem to make that big of a difference, just like scouting college players. It’s a convoluted system where I didn’t feel like I could tell who was the right or wrong pick. It also was never clear to me if I was having to actually do anything other than just hire scouts and assign them to regions or if there was something more to do like in CFB recruiting. Ultimately, I found myself just simulating that because it was nonsensical at best and boring at worst.

Editing players is possible in franchise mode. On the surface, it seems cool! You can change the numbers of players, their stats, contract, even their age! That last one seems really weird, but you can change it if you’d like. The problem is that the Madden programming strikes again here with a bad bug. If a player edits more than one category, and it doesn’t matter what categories are chosen, then the player loses their official picture and they get slapped with a generic face in the menu. At first I thought this might be an intended thing for editing players so if people show off their stats and see the generic face, they know it’s an edited player. That doesn’t seem like the case, though. It’s just a really bad bug and one that may or may not get patched.

Superstar mode is soulless and boring.

It’s no surprise I wasn’t a fan of this mode as it’s very similar to CFB’s Road to Glory mode. It’s the same constraints where you’re stuck with the playcalling of the AI, you can’t play every position, and it just feels empty.

The gameplay is the same, of course, but it’s the stuff in between the games that is the problem, with one exception: The combine. The combine mini-games are very fun and I enjoyed trying to get better scores each time, but the fact that I could reset if I got a bad grade rubs me the wrong way. Yes, I want to get the best scores possible and be a top draft pick, but I want to earn it and not just have replay after replay without issue. The mini-games aren’t too hard, though the instructions at times are frustrating. Either way, once the combine is done, this is where the fun in the simulation ends for me in this mode.

The interactions between your player and the coaches, teammates, media are just boring. It’s basically picking one of two choices and you get a boost based off that choice. There’s no voice acting, so it’s like playing superstar on a PS1 or PS2. After a couple of in-game weeks of this, I was bored and just wanted those scenes to finish quickly. While I played through a couple of seasons in franchise mode, I didn’t come close to the end of one season in Superstar mode.

Ultimate Team is Ultimate Team and there’s not much else to say there.

I checked out Ultimate Team briefly, mainly because this game wants you to go to Ultimate Team every time it’s started up. Throwing a starter pack and little bonuses in a vague way is a simple concept to get new players to go to the Ultimate Team mode. I didn’t put together a team, play a game, etc. Ultimate Team, year in and year out, is the same: Open packs, build a team, play online while you’re spending extra money on those packs. Yes, you can earn packs without spending money, but it’s handicapping yourself against people who are willing to spend a lot of money in building up god-tier teams opening countless numbers of packs. Honestly, I wish this mode just didn’t exist.

Is the game worth full price?

No.

Simply put, wait for this game to drop in price or, if you have EA Play, it will be available there soon enough.

Let’s wrap it up on another year of disappointment.

The sad thing is that I wish this game was better. I want Madden to be good. I want it to have tons of features that we haven’t seen before, more depth to franchise mode and Superstar mode, and I want it to hook me.

Unfortunately, there’s no proof that this is going to happen. It’s a broken record, a dead horse that’s been beaten, all of the quirky ways you can put it. The bottom line is that this franchise needs new life. It needs a new engine. It needs more than just a half-coat of paint on it every single year. I’d love for EA Sports to come out around December and say “You know what? We’ve screwed up. We’re going to take a year off and rebuild this game from the ground up.” Those words would be music to just about everyone’s ears.

Instead, what we’re left with is a very generic game that hasn’t changed much over the course of over a decade with clunky AI and stripped down simulation modes. It’s football, and it’s the only real football we’ll have until the NFL decides it wants someone else to have a chance. 

And that’s the real disappointment.