Earlier this year, EA Sports released Madden NFL 25 on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Our very own Tony Odett reviewed the game and found it to be a solid and serviceable football title. Three months later, we find ourselves faced with the evolution of the console space. The next generation of gaming is no longer next gen; it is here with the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, and with it comes next gen Madden.
Historically, Madden on new hardware has been something of a letdown, bringing a feature-stripped yet visually striking version of its title to market. Madden NFL 25 is different in that regard. Everything is carried over this time around. You want to play a connected Franchise? No problem. Madden Ultimate Team? Yep, it’s there as well. Legacy players like Dan Marino and John Elway? Most certainly. Madden NFL 25 was not stripped down to bring it to next gen, and if you want to know the ins and outs of the core game, check out Tony’s review.
So what is new in Madden NFL 25 on PS4 and Xbox One? Well, it all comes down to presentation. Players have a higher polygon count and look far more detailed on the new systems than they have previously. This level of detail has been passed on to all the people you can see on screen, be it coaches, the announcers, sideline press and camera crews, or even the stadium crowd. For the first time ever, every character in the stadium is rendered in 3D and this gives the stadium a more realistic feeling than in the past.
Additional to the extra detail on all the character models, the players have also undergone an animation upgrade. Not that the animations in the other versions of Madden NFL 25 were bad (although they were sometimes funny), but the animation system on display for these new versions is superb. When players bang into each other, they react appropriately, and it does wonders to the overall presentation of the title. Yes, there are still some weird animation quirks where players will sometimes bounce around a pile awkwardly but for the most part it is a step up.
While the graphical upgrades are mostly positive, I did happen to notice that the sidelines seemed weirdly vacant. When I watch a game on television, the sidelines are always crawling with players, coaches, trainers, press, and other random people that probably don’t belong there. When I play Madden NFL 25, things don’t look as real. There is a noticeable lack of life on the sidelines, and despite the crowd looking more real, this detracts from that television production level of quality that the game is obviously going for.
Worse, though, is the announcing. The key to any television style production is great announcing. Hearing announcers state the same lines over and over again is a drag, and it really takes you out of the experience. I was hoping with the new dynamic announcing system that this would have been fixed, but I regret to report that over a half a season of play, I didn’t hear anything truly dynamic about my team or players for that season, and worse yet, still heard the same tired lines over and over again, including drastic misreads of the context of the game. When I have 7 first downs in a game, the announce team shouldn’t be talking about how great it is for a rookie quarterback to get his first first down of the game. And they definitely shouldn’t be getting the downs incorrect; if it is 3rd and 2, they shouldn’t be talking about how big a play that first-down catch on second down was, because it never happened. These were issues that plagued my experience on Madden NFL 25 on Xbox One and should have been fixed with this new dynamic announce system.
Madden NFL 25 is a shiny piece of gaming, and it is fully functional, but unless you haven’t already played Madden this year, and if you were going to play a football game this year you probably have, then it is hard to recommend a second purchase, even as just a $10 upgrade. For those first timers, though, it is a solid piece of game that is prettier than its last-gen counterparts but comparable feature wise.
About Author
