Mark Warren
This past year, the handegg team I follow – the Seattle Seahawks – missed the playoffs. They weren’t terrible by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, there were some genuinely fun moments peppered throughout their stumble to a 9-8 record. Here’s to you, Jake Bobo, and to you, Geno Smith, for being a nice guy to Drew Lock.
They weren’t that good either though, hence the whole ‘firing a head coach that defined an entire era for the franchise’ thing. They were right in the NFL’s mushy middle, with enough ups and downs to have you pulling your hair out just as often as you were cheering. Madden NFL 25’s – no, not that one – is a bit like that too.
As ever, there’s a whole lot in the game that you’ll recognise instantly if you’ve played a Madden within about the past five years. It’s down to the nuances to make this year’s entry stand out from what came before, and to be fair, in a year that’s seen a fair amount of its attention and marketing push go towards comeback kid EA Sports College Football 25, there are a fair few changes for the better.
Gameplay-wise for example, the big selling point is “BOOM Tech” which is designed to deliver more realistic tackles and collisions, something that’s long been on the list of things EA’s been aiming to improve, as anyone who’s seen a rush end in a bunch of players dropping on the deck and flopping like a fish will tell you. This time though, it genuinely does seem to have helped. You’ll still get the odd awkward looking collision, but most of the heftier hits, especially those made via the hit stick, do feel more fluid and natural.
On the other side of the coin, as a runner, you feel a bit more dynamic in your sprints, jukes, and jives. I found myself able to pull off a few more of those spin and hesitations than usual, which tells me the new running mechanics had given me enough extra confidence that I didn’t need to rely so heavily on just booking it straight into the endzone before anything fluky could happen. That’s a pretty fun, if not spectacularly adrenaline-inducing, base for the action.
In most of the match-ups with the AI I’ve had so far, I feel like offences are a bit more powerful than defences, possibly due to the new catching changes – which are designed to facilitate more high risk/high reward haul-ins by the likes of receivers and tight ends. It wasn’t all the time, but I’ve ended up in a fair few shootouts, though with the changes to tackling likely having threatened to stack the deck towards the D, I’d understand if it turns out things have been tuned towards those trying to score points for now, possibly with mind to that being tweaked as the year goes on. Naturally, there’s a bunch of more in-depth stuff piled on top of that for the clipboard connoisseurs out there too, with new signature animations for different players and changes to run blocking, giving you something to look for if you’re big on the details. The new dynamic kickoffs are there to match this year’s new rules too, but aside from there being less fair catches, you might well not notice much of a difference unless you’re big into special teams.
Then there are the new kicking meters, which follow a bit of a theme for Madden 25 – replacing things that looked a fair bit dated, even if they didn’t always feel it. It’s one click to set direction, followed immediately by another to set power, with less margin for error than before and therefore an increased chance of properly ballsing things up. Yep, kicks, especially long ones, are a lot more of a challenge now, as the fans who’ve collected all of my attempts which have sailed just past the post will tell you.
Following that same theme I outlined before, one of the most noticeable changes off the field are the redesigned menus, which do make things feel a lot more fresh, even if they’re a pretty superficial change. The redesigned draft visuals for Franchise mode are along similar lines, in this case replacing a setup that’d felt decidedly stale and unreflective for a while. Now, however, we’ve got a silent Roger Goodell to boo as he poses with each of your team’s next great hopes and others’ top picks. I jest, but there’s some decent variety to it, even if it’s brought down a bit by the fact some of the faces you’ll see being drafted are ones you’ll recognise as having been in the series’ drafts for years. Also, some players’ proportions can look a bit weird as they stride out on stage, but given how weird real-life athletes can look in suits, EA might need letting off there.
Beyond this, Franchise Mode is a mixed bag that’s largely standing still, with the same kind of minimalistically-rendered – that’s neither good or bad on its own in my book – cutscenes free from voice acting or much drama. The changes to player progression do seem to have fulfilled their goal of making young stars ascend faster, with Jordan Addison and JJ McCarthy having rapidly risen to help the Vikings to a 2025 title in one of my saves (sorry Vikes fans). The new team builder mechanic does build on the recently revamped team relocation mechanics, but at first it looked like I’d be totally unable to actually make my own team via the website you have to use to do so. It seems the UK version is just plain broken as of writing, so you’ve got to pretend you’re in the US just to avoid getting served up a 404 error when you try to load the thing up.
Despite the fact it offers a decent amount of logo, uniform, and stadium customisation on the whole – even if you might encounter an issue that sees your team be referred to by the first part of its name twice (eg the Boston Boston) once it’s in the game – that episode made me question why the team builder couldn’t have just been integrated into the game, rather than forcing you to use an outside website. Especially in the case of players who might not be fussed about uploading a tiny custom image to serve as the logo of a team they’ve dubbed something like the Grimsby Gobblers. It’s commendable Madden’s finally trying to match the long-superior customisation offered by the likes of NBA 2K, but additional refinement is definitely needed if that gap to MyLeague is actually going to close.
Switching gears, the changes to superstar mode are even more minimal, with the ability to import your College Football 25 player and a creator that allows you to make a player that looks detailed enough not be a generic NPC if you’re not doing the whole import thing being the headlines. That creator’s ok, I suppose, even if you only start off with the option of one tattoo, which seems a bit crap, though you can earn more by just playing. Come on lads, at least give newbies three different kinds of embarrassing 2000s tribal and some footballs with flames coming out of them.
Right, now Ultimate Team. Generally speaking, if you were just looking for more to do as you ride the pack dopamine rush to places that’ll probably have you moaning about scripting whenever you lose an online match, EA’s risen to that challenge. There are eight seasons of stuff planned throughout the game’s lifespan, some decently fun sole challenges to grind away at, and some changes to how head-to-head rankings work, with a bigger emphasis on wins and rewards.
So, it’s another year, another pretty mixed bag, even if it does feel like things might be trending in a slightly more positive direction. Here’s the thing though, like those Seahawks, things’ll only keep running in place unless Madden can offer some more meaningful change going forwards. Here’s hoping having the series’ cheeky sibling back on the block, with its marching bands and moral quandaries about exploitation, can help spur that shift.
Madden NFL 25 is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, PS4, Xbox One. It was reviewed on PS5 using a code provided by the publisher.
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