Madden NFL 25 Review in Progress

ign.com:

If football is a game of inches, then Madden typically manages to perfectly recapture that feeling in the minutiae of its year-to-year iterations. Every August, fans sit around and obsessively try to figure out what has changed, if the under-the-hood adjustments actually matter, if the new systems do what EA says they do, and if things truly feel any better. Usually, that is. Not this year. I haven’t played enough of Madden NFL 25 to render a final verdict just yet, but I can already tell that things feel very different than they do in Madden NFL 24 – and I don’t need to bring out the chains to see that good progress has been made.

EA has been hyping up Madden 25’s updated looks, and honestly, that’s where its improvements are most immediately clear. The menus are much cleaner – your options are big, clearly delineated, and easy to understand, and, miraculously, largely lag-free. This may not seem like a big deal, but if you played Madden 24 at launch, it feels like mana from heaven. It truly is the little things. My wife, who specializes in UX design and has watched me play entirely too much Madden 24 over the last year, walked by while I was playing this year’s iteration and casually remarked that “this looks like an actual menu designed by an actual person.” Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. They heard us.

Madden NFL 24 makes several much-needed improvements to the on-field experience thanks to fantastic additions to animations and AI, but it still suffers from the same problems it always has once you get off the field: everything here is just done better in every other sports sim, even the other ones made by EA, and this year’s tweaks just aren’t enough to make up for the series’ continued feeling of sameness and lack of progress. To continue the metaphor, Madden feels like a decent but not great football team: content to coast. If it were in the right division I could see it sneaking into the playoffs, or overperforming in a good year. But it’s the kind of team