My experience with the Madden series has been up and down for the past 20 years as they changed for the worse after their great PS2 generation run; and I only really played the series on Xbox 360 and PS3 when tasked with reviewing it up to Madden NFL 25for the PS4 and Xbox One’s launch. Since then, my experience with the series has been just playing EA Play trials for a few hours to see if it was still Madden football before moving on.
I mainly wanted to reduce all of Deshaun Watson’s stats and cut him from the Browns as a cathartic move for how terrible of a person he is and how disastrous his time in Cleveland has been. The last Madden game I bought was last year’s game in one of those bundles with College Football on PS5 when both could be had for the normal price of one of them, though it was mostly for CFB25, to be honest. Let’s just say that I’ve been a very casual observer of Madden for the past 10 years, as a quick summary of my point.
With that quick overview of my personal history with this series, it was interesting to jump back into a new Madden that I was a bit more invested in playing enough to do a review of it. It has all of the familiar modes with Franchise seeing some smaller updates that seek to improve the realism and authenticity of the experience and this weird Superstar career mode that has certainly changed from what I remembered of the Franchise-lite experience it was back in the day, whatever that means anymore. Ultimate Team still exists and is a whatever mode for me as somebody that does not want to play online and has no patience for digging through the huge pile of challenges it offers with a ton of themed cards with specific upgrades that are so heavily nested in that menu that my brain begins to melt at the thought of trying to figure it out when the game doesn’t really care to make it easy to do. Franchise was an easy enough starting point to see how things have held up from last year’s game and what I want out of it.
You get the usual experience of playing Madden before the season launches where the rosters are out of date and you have to play in a more casual way without having the final rosters for a more accurate start to a long-term franchise. It throws a lot of options at you for managing your coaches, practices, draft scouting, and a host of other things that are just too much for somebody like me that is a lapsed fan and wants to just play the game. You can automate most of that to simplify it in a way that helps, which is necessary to get to the good parts more quickly. They try to inject some story into it with these occasional moments where your head coach is talking to players, other coaches, or the media about what’s going on with the team that are just bland enough that they are easily skippable because they don’t really affect anything worthwhile.
There are too many digits on those numbers.
With College Football 26, you can finally import draft classes and your Road to Glory players to their respective modes, though you can also find draft classes on the download center that other players have made. I mentioned the Download Center and I just have to take a detour for a minute to tell you how surprisingly bad this feature is compared to other sports games. They offer the most barebones setup for looking at what people have submitted that I’ve seen in a long time and it should be impossible to launch in this state. It lets players upload custom teams, playbooks, draft classes, and rosters for others to use, but you can’t see most of the content that I assume is being uploaded regularly unless the community has given up on it. The teams that show up include nothing pulled from any popular shows or movies, which should be impossible to achieve, and the ones that are there look like they’re using the default logos that come with the game that nobody would use. Rosters and draft classes don’t have any sorting options, so you better hope the randomly-named files that are showing up are recent because you have no other way to know what is going on other than downloading them to see for yourself. I tried to see if anybody had good updated rosters ahead of Week 1 with the Micah Parsons trade included and teams’ final rosters, but I could only find old rosters and those that were not complete with player ratings randomly changed for no reason. These downloads even have ratings despite there being no option to rate anything here. It’s wild that MLB The Show is doing all of this better than Madden despite the assumed gap in sales.
The pre-season boredom got to me enough that I even tried to make my own weird roster where I wanted to move almost everybody in the league to teams nearest where they played college football for something out of the ordinary that would give my Ohio State Browns a great roster. But after a bunch of time spent on this, I found out that it was impossible to do because the salary caps are still in play when I’m not even in franchise mode. This idea involved cutting the most highly-paid players from most of their teams, but Cincinnati, for example, couldn’t sign any other players because they didn’t have room in the salary cap when that shouldn’t even be an issue. If I tried to do that in Franchise mode, there’s no way to really do it the way that makes sense since you’d need to add fake players for every team and constantly switch between them to make the necessary roster changes. The fantasy draft option is probably the way I should go with that, but the point of just editing the roster file is to have something easily accessible for starting a new franchise and that is not how I would’ve done this in previous years that I’ve done this sort of thing. With this long rant-and-sidetracked-bit about how much things have changed since I was really into one of these Maddens, let’s get back to Franchise mode.
Madden is always at its best when you’re just moving through the games, seeing how you compare to the other teams, and kind of breaking things a bit. I’m not really good enough to hang on All-Pro difficulty and I don’t have the patience to mess with the sliders, nor download sliders due to the issues mentioned above. Instead, I stick to Pro for letting me have fun with my Browns. They’re not going to go undefeated and win a Super Bowl this year unless something amazing happens, so this is how I get my kicks before reality steps in to let me know where they really stand.
Just destroying the Jets was a fun time.
With 15-minute quarters and an aggressive accelerated clock setting, I can get a full game experience that should be realistic compared to the average team in the league, but I easily get more plays per game than every simulated game gets. Joe Flacco doesn’t have the most passing yards because I’m so good, it’s because he has about 100 more passes thrown than the next guy. Jerome Ford isn’t leading the league in rushing yards because he’s amazing, it’s because he averages more rushes than any other back. Every team I face always has the top tacklers in the game because their linebackers are the ones stopping my guys on most plays. Those extra plays means my defense has a number of the top spots at various tackle and sack stats, which isn’t just because I tend to blitz a lot and Myles Garrett is that good. Maybe it’s the difficulty I’m on, but I don’t think that is the solution since I still make plenty of mistakes with my poor play. It’s weird that I feel like I have to play less of the game on the simulation setting so that I’m more in line with the rest of the league that is simulated, which is kind of disappointing when I see a lot of the marketing points for what’s new this year is about how more realistic the players play in the game as they’re using all of this AI-driven data that the league is collecting so you have more stats at all times than you really need. It doesn’t help that the game often messes up its stat graphics in the game with percentages that have too many places shown or the wrong players are shown for game summaries when injuries occurred to give backups better stats than the starters.
There are some cool additions to the game experience with a solid halftime show featuring clips from some of the other games as they give you an idea of what’s going on elsewhere, though it still feels hollow as it’s not really a halftime show. Some guy just shows you three plays and that game’s score before showing a screen with all of the scores from around the league, though the game you’re playing is never on that when network halftime shows never ignore the game they’re usually coming from. You get no crew of guys that Fox and CBS usually have to discuss what’s going on, so the halftime show is neat on the basis of what Madden has done before while not really adding much to the experience. They use the same trick for a Weekly Recap show you can watch when you finish your game that also features three games, including the game you just finished, but it can also mess up the stats it quotes from your game like it often does for me. It makes the entire experience of this cool feature seem lacking, and I have to wonder if they used some form of generative AI to generate these recap scripts if it’s getting basic facts wrong, making it all the more disappointing.
Roger Goodell looks so bad in the game, which is not a bad thing because he is a terrible person.
The Superstar mode seems like a solid adaptation of the Road to Glory mode from the new College Football games. The ability to import your graduated players over to it is great, but it’s more of a means to get into the multiplayer part of the mode. You get drafted by a team as it kind of fakes the experience of being a rookie every week by having you do a random training minigame straight out of Road to Glory and then make a decision on what activity to do, usually between one related to the team and another that involves somebody in your “inner circle” that can be a silly hacker or a tattoo artist that unlocks tattoos for Hawaiians, Japanese, and Tongan people that my white guy should not absolutely use.
The real issue for Superstar mode is that it does nothing to make you feel like you’re in the NFL with most of what you get in the Franchise mode. It just pushed my rookie QB on the Browns to play a chunk of an NFL game a few games into the season for no reason and had me become the starting QB after a handful of games with no explanation anywhere. It doesn’t help that the rosters got wildly changed by the computer so that Joe Flacco was gone and there were new players starting on offense I had never heard of that just created a lot of confusion that took me out of even my headcanon for what was going on here. The other big flaw is that despite changing settings to longer quarters, the game forces you to only play 6 minute quarters. If you have the accelerated clock option on that makes sense for 14 minute quarters, you’re just wasting so much time to make it hard to complete the goals the coach is giving you that help you progress. It feels like an afterthought of a mode that could’ve been cool, but it seems obvious how much this mode is focused on the ranked 3v3 multiplayer that looks like their attempt at competing with NBA 2K’s more popular versions.
As down as I am on a lot of the features outside of the game experience, playing the games themselves are still pretty fun. I suck at the advanced passing stuff they’ve pushed for the hardcore Madden fans that can do all of this pinpoint stuff that takes me out of the game, so I use the classic passing that has a new addition of a meter that you hold the WR’s button down to fill up to a certain point for the best possible pass you can throw on that play. It’s just enough to help me feel a bit more engaged as I know when I throw bad passes that it’s because I screwed up the meter thing or because I threw a bad pass that is easily knocked down, picked off, or sails well over my player’s head. My other issue is that I feel like defense is a bit busted so that my Browns defense running zone plays tend to give up big plays so easily when it looks like everybody’s just standing around and doing nothing even if a guy is approaching them, which is why I’m picking as much man defense with some blitzes as I can because they tend to give me much better results. That said, I do appreciate that the classic issue of trying to switch players on defense to try to tackle a guy still almost always goes to the wrong guy, so I miss a chance to stop that guy. That’s a classic issue that I’m sure is harder to solve than it seems, but I’d like them to try addressing it at some point.
The presentation doesn’t know how to handle teams coming off of a bye week.
With all of that rambling detailing issues both big and small, I do have to say again that Madden NFL 26 is a fun time as long as you can accept the caveats that come with it. You may be able to adjust sliders to fix some issues and just overlook the rest. There seems to be a solid foundation to build upon if the yearly release lets them make the right improvements in the nine months that devs typically get to work on the next game for a better experience in the future. I’ll just have to adjust my expectations for what can be addressed in updates this year over the next few months. I’d say that College Football 26 ends up being the better game between the two due to a stronger foundation and less fluff that adds nothing to the parts of the game that I enjoy.
My experience with the Madden series has been up and down for the past 20 years as they changed for the worse after their great PS2 generation run; and I only really played the series on Xbox 360 and PS3…
My experience with the Madden series has been up and down for the past 20 years as they changed for the worse after their great PS2 generation run; and I only really played the series on Xbox 360 and PS3 when tasked with reviewing it up to Madden NFL 25for the PS4 and Xbox One’s launch. Since then, my experience with the series has been just playing EA Play trials for a few hours to see if it was still Madden football before moving on.
I mainly wanted to reduce all of Deshaun Watson’s stats and cut him from the Browns as a cathartic move for how terrible of a person he is and how disastrous his time in Cleveland has been. The last Madden game I bought was last year’s game in one of those bundles with College Football on PS5 when both could be had for the normal price of one of them, though it was mostly for CFB25, to be honest. Let’s just say that I’ve been a very casual observer of Madden for the past 10 years, as a quick summary of my point.
With that quick overview of my personal history with this series, it was interesting to jump back into a new Madden that I was a bit more invested in playing enough to do a review of it. It has all of the familiar modes with Franchise seeing some smaller updates that seek to improve the realism and authenticity of the experience and this weird Superstar career mode that has certainly changed from what I remembered of the Franchise-lite experience it was back in the day, whatever that means anymore. Ultimate Team still exists and is a whatever mode for me as somebody that does not want to play online and has no patience for digging through the huge pile of challenges it offers with a ton of themed cards with specific upgrades that are so heavily nested in that menu that my brain begins to melt at the thought of trying to figure it out when the game doesn’t really care to make it easy to do. Franchise was an easy enough starting point to see how things have held up from last year’s game and what I want out of it.
You get the usual experience of playing Madden before the season launches where the rosters are out of date and you have to play in a more casual way without having the final rosters for a more accurate start to a long-term franchise. It throws a lot of options at you for managing your coaches, practices, draft scouting, and a host of other things that are just too much for somebody like me that is a lapsed fan and wants to just play the game. You can automate most of that to simplify it in a way that helps, which is necessary to get to the good parts more quickly. They try to inject some story into it with these occasional moments where your head coach is talking to players, other coaches, or the media about what’s going on with the team that are just bland enough that they are easily skippable because they don’t really affect anything worthwhile.
There are too many digits on those numbers.
With College Football 26, you can finally import draft classes and your Road to Glory players to their respective modes, though you can also find draft classes on the download center that other players have made. I mentioned the Download Center and I just have to take a detour for a minute to tell you how surprisingly bad this feature is compared to other sports games. They offer the most barebones setup for looking at what people have submitted that I’ve seen in a long time and it should be impossible to launch in this state. It lets players upload custom teams, playbooks, draft classes, and rosters for others to use, but you can’t see most of the content that I assume is being uploaded regularly unless the community has given up on it. The teams that show up include nothing pulled from any popular shows or movies, which should be impossible to achieve, and the ones that are there look like they’re using the default logos that come with the game that nobody would use. Rosters and draft classes don’t have any sorting options, so you better hope the randomly-named files that are showing up are recent because you have no other way to know what is going on other than downloading them to see for yourself. I tried to see if anybody had good updated rosters ahead of Week 1 with the Micah Parsons trade included and teams’ final rosters, but I could only find old rosters and those that were not complete with player ratings randomly changed for no reason. These downloads even have ratings despite there being no option to rate anything here. It’s wild that MLB The Show is doing all of this better than Madden despite the assumed gap in sales.
The pre-season boredom got to me enough that I even tried to make my own weird roster where I wanted to move almost everybody in the league to teams nearest where they played college football for something out of the ordinary that would give my Ohio State Browns a great roster. But after a bunch of time spent on this, I found out that it was impossible to do because the salary caps are still in play when I’m not even in franchise mode. This idea involved cutting the most highly-paid players from most of their teams, but Cincinnati, for example, couldn’t sign any other players because they didn’t have room in the salary cap when that shouldn’t even be an issue. If I tried to do that in Franchise mode, there’s no way to really do it the way that makes sense since you’d need to add fake players for every team and constantly switch between them to make the necessary roster changes. The fantasy draft option is probably the way I should go with that, but the point of just editing the roster file is to have something easily accessible for starting a new franchise and that is not how I would’ve done this in previous years that I’ve done this sort of thing. With this long rant-and-sidetracked-bit about how much things have changed since I was really into one of these Maddens, let’s get back to Franchise mode.
Madden is always at its best when you’re just moving through the games, seeing how you compare to the other teams, and kind of breaking things a bit. I’m not really good enough to hang on All-Pro difficulty and I don’t have the patience to mess with the sliders, nor download sliders due to the issues mentioned above. Instead, I stick to Pro for letting me have fun with my Browns. They’re not going to go undefeated and win a Super Bowl this year unless something amazing happens, so this is how I get my kicks before reality steps in to let me know where they really stand.
Just destroying the Jets was a fun time.
With 15-minute quarters and an aggressive accelerated clock setting, I can get a full game experience that should be realistic compared to the average team in the league, but I easily get more plays per game than every simulated game gets. Joe Flacco doesn’t have the most passing yards because I’m so good, it’s because he has about 100 more passes thrown than the next guy. Jerome Ford isn’t leading the league in rushing yards because he’s amazing, it’s because he averages more rushes than any other back. Every team I face always has the top tacklers in the game because their linebackers are the ones stopping my guys on most plays. Those extra plays means my defense has a number of the top spots at various tackle and sack stats, which isn’t just because I tend to blitz a lot and Myles Garrett is that good. Maybe it’s the difficulty I’m on, but I don’t think that is the solution since I still make plenty of mistakes with my poor play. It’s weird that I feel like I have to play less of the game on the simulation setting so that I’m more in line with the rest of the league that is simulated, which is kind of disappointing when I see a lot of the marketing points for what’s new this year is about how more realistic the players play in the game as they’re using all of this AI-driven data that the league is collecting so you have more stats at all times than you really need. It doesn’t help that the game often messes up its stat graphics in the game with percentages that have too many places shown or the wrong players are shown for game summaries when injuries occurred to give backups better stats than the starters.
There are some cool additions to the game experience with a solid halftime show featuring clips from some of the other games as they give you an idea of what’s going on elsewhere, though it still feels hollow as it’s not really a halftime show. Some guy just shows you three plays and that game’s score before showing a screen with all of the scores from around the league, though the game you’re playing is never on that when network halftime shows never ignore the game they’re usually coming from. You get no crew of guys that Fox and CBS usually have to discuss what’s going on, so the halftime show is neat on the basis of what Madden has done before while not really adding much to the experience. They use the same trick for a Weekly Recap show you can watch when you finish your game that also features three games, including the game you just finished, but it can also mess up the stats it quotes from your game like it often does for me. It makes the entire experience of this cool feature seem lacking, and I have to wonder if they used some form of generative AI to generate these recap scripts if it’s getting basic facts wrong, making it all the more disappointing.
Roger Goodell looks so bad in the game, which is not a bad thing because he is a terrible person.
The Superstar mode seems like a solid adaptation of the Road to Glory mode from the new College Football games. The ability to import your graduated players over to it is great, but it’s more of a means to get into the multiplayer part of the mode. You get drafted by a team as it kind of fakes the experience of being a rookie every week by having you do a random training minigame straight out of Road to Glory and then make a decision on what activity to do, usually between one related to the team and another that involves somebody in your “inner circle” that can be a silly hacker or a tattoo artist that unlocks tattoos for Hawaiians, Japanese, and Tongan people that my white guy should not absolutely use.
The real issue for Superstar mode is that it does nothing to make you feel like you’re in the NFL with most of what you get in the Franchise mode. It just pushed my rookie QB on the Browns to play a chunk of an NFL game a few games into the season for no reason and had me become the starting QB after a handful of games with no explanation anywhere. It doesn’t help that the rosters got wildly changed by the computer so that Joe Flacco was gone and there were new players starting on offense I had never heard of that just created a lot of confusion that took me out of even my headcanon for what was going on here. The other big flaw is that despite changing settings to longer quarters, the game forces you to only play 6 minute quarters. If you have the accelerated clock option on that makes sense for 14 minute quarters, you’re just wasting so much time to make it hard to complete the goals the coach is giving you that help you progress. It feels like an afterthought of a mode that could’ve been cool, but it seems obvious how much this mode is focused on the ranked 3v3 multiplayer that looks like their attempt at competing with NBA 2K’s more popular versions.
As down as I am on a lot of the features outside of the game experience, playing the games themselves are still pretty fun. I suck at the advanced passing stuff they’ve pushed for the hardcore Madden fans that can do all of this pinpoint stuff that takes me out of the game, so I use the classic passing that has a new addition of a meter that you hold the WR’s button down to fill up to a certain point for the best possible pass you can throw on that play. It’s just enough to help me feel a bit more engaged as I know when I throw bad passes that it’s because I screwed up the meter thing or because I threw a bad pass that is easily knocked down, picked off, or sails well over my player’s head. My other issue is that I feel like defense is a bit busted so that my Browns defense running zone plays tend to give up big plays so easily when it looks like everybody’s just standing around and doing nothing even if a guy is approaching them, which is why I’m picking as much man defense with some blitzes as I can because they tend to give me much better results. That said, I do appreciate that the classic issue of trying to switch players on defense to try to tackle a guy still almost always goes to the wrong guy, so I miss a chance to stop that guy. That’s a classic issue that I’m sure is harder to solve than it seems, but I’d like them to try addressing it at some point.
The presentation doesn’t know how to handle teams coming off of a bye week.
With all of that rambling detailing issues both big and small, I do have to say again that Madden NFL 26 is a fun time as long as you can accept the caveats that come with it. You may be able to adjust sliders to fix some issues and just overlook the rest. There seems to be a solid foundation to build upon if the yearly release lets them make the right improvements in the nine months that devs typically get to work on the next game for a better experience in the future. I’ll just have to adjust my expectations for what can be addressed in updates this year over the next few months. I’d say that College Football 26 ends up being the better game between the two due to a stronger foundation and less fluff that adds nothing to the parts of the game that I enjoy.
by Chris Selogy
