Ryan Miller

This is it, the “make or break” year for Madden. Unfortunately like most other aspects of this franchise these words too have proven to be hollow and soulless. I’ll put as much effort into my review as Madden put into their product this year, simple and short. While the game play does in fact feel smoother to play than in recent years, these minor tweaks and handful of new animations are not game changing in the slightest nor should they be praised considering how small they feel. Overall Madden 24 does not feel like football on any level yet alone a “simulation” of the NFL. It is a lazy product that is emblematic of more than a decade of failure both to the fans and the NFL licensing as a whole. Despite minor improvements you still don’t feel like you’re in control of any players on the field, merely at the whim of an animation dice roll. The presentation is laughably bare bones and lazy compared to other sports games on the market like 2k or even other EA properties like Fifa (now EA sports fc). It really makes you wonder if they even care about the sport they represent. From a technical standpoint the game looks alright. The lighting is a tad bit improved and the uniforms look better than they ever have. However what steps forward the graphics may take, the game still looks dated and considerably clunky. This is shocking considering we are on a new generation of hardware, that should empower the dev team to push the boundaries of what an NFL simulation style game could look like. This is compounded with the feeling that over the last decade the Madden franchise has failed to reach the heights of even ps2 era football games, both in presentation and features. As the technology grows more advanced instead of genre defining sports titles we are given a game that looks slightly better than last generation and stripped of legacy features rebranded as new like 24’s “Super Star Mode.” Technically the game is also a bit of a mess, menus are laggy and broken, the game is unstable on all platforms with various bugs in both game play and a variety of crashes. I suspect this is due to the decades old frostbite engine they continually dress up to avoid breaking the yearly release cycle. This Madden engine is now a Frankenstein’s monster of oddly fitting new code that is attached to a rotten core. Until they rebuild the game from scratch and move to a more physics based game engine these technical and graphical issues will persist. Ultimately Madden 24 is what we have come to expect from this once great industry leading franchise, a roster update, a reset on ultimate team, and a few new features that were already in the game a decade ago like the widely talked about improved number of trade slots in franchise mode. This is yet another soulless cash grab, rebranded as shiny and new. This is rotten game headlined by a notoriously rotten company. It’s a real shame the NFL willingly continues to watch from the sidelines as their product is pimped out in such sad fashion, year after year reskinned and reshelfed with minimal effort. Like EA themselves I too have become apathetic towards this franchise. I hope one day we get another great football game, but I won’t be hedging my bets on Madden anytime soon to deliver that experience to us. It’s time we let someone who actually cares about this sport have a crack it, it’s time we vote with our wallets to perhaps force change. But then again we said the same thing last year, and the year before, and the year before that…