We finally have another big-budget football game to compare Madden to! Yeah, sure, it's another EA Sports game, so it's not much of a contrast. We still haven't gotten a proper new game from 2k, so we still don't get to compare Madden against another studio's vision. In fact, the closest thing that we have to a direct competitor to Madden is probably still NFL Pro Era (which released its first sequel earlier this year, but I haven't played it due to on-going elbow pain). Pro Era is, however, a VR game, and more of a middle-budget "Double-A" game, and so it also is not directly comparable to Madden.

So how does Madden look when compared against the only other football game at its level? Well, not very good -- which shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. I'm not exactly loving College Football 25. In fact, I've been a pretty outspoken critic of its since its release. I didn't have a honeymoon period with it the way that so many other reviewers and critics did, and I was noticing and reporting flaws and limitations from day 1. Unsurprisingly, my biggest complaints about both game are the things that they don't do, but which the other does.

There are multiple commentary teams.

To copy-paste, or not to copy-paste?

There are some features from College Football 25 that did find their way into Madden. Just like the college game, Madden now has multiple broadcast commentary teams. In fact, Madden got 50% more broadcast teams, as it has 3 different commentary teams, instead of CFB's 2. They are of mixed quality. Mike Tirico's line delivery might be the worst of the bunch, and it's often stilted and disjoint. Kate Scott, on the other hand brings a lot of energy -- maybe too much energy! She is a welcome change from the normally sterile and lifeless Madden commentary. Greg Olsen is probably the highlight of the bunch.

In real life, Brandon Gaudin and Charles Davis commonly calls day games on CBS (usually AFC matchups). Greg Olsen usually does day games on Fox (usually NFC matchups), while Brock Huard is an analyst for Fox. Mike Terico usually does Sunday Night football on NBC. Kate Scott is the regular announcer for the Philadelphia 76ers baseball team, and has called some preseason NFL games. Which of these teams calls any given game in Madden's Franchise Mode is completely random, and the user can't even choose which teams gives the commentary for any given Franchise game. It isn't based on the day of the week, or on the time of day, or on which teams are playing. If you want a specific team to only call Monday night games, for example, you would have to start the match, then quit and restart until you get the commentary team who you want.

Even if it is random, the extra variety is welcome.

The half-slides from College Football 25 have been imported into Madden.

Madden also ported over the revised slide protection mechanics that allow for a half-slide, which is a welcome addition to the game. But for some reason, they didn't port the overlay that shows which blocker is going to block which defender. So I can't be certain if the play is going to be blocked the way that I want it to be, or if flipping the play will improve the blocking, or if motioning a tight end or fullback to a different position might create a better matchup or leverage advantage.

Madden also imported the new kicking meter and Read Option controls that were introduced in CFB 25. I'm already familiar with both these concepts from CFB, so I'm not having nearly as much trouble adapting to them in Madden. Unlike CFB 25, Madden does have the option to revert the kicking meter back to the classic meter from previous Madden games. No such luck with the Read Option controls though.

I often do skill trainer drills when I boot up a new Madden game for the first time, just to see if any of the new mechanics have changed the way that the game feels, or if there are any new mechanics that need tutorializing. I was pleased to see that, unlike College Football 25, Madden still has a Skill Trainer, and it's still being updated with new drills and content. For example, I don't recall the "Pocket Pressence" drill in Skill Trainer mode in previous years.

The tutorial for the new kicking meter is just a single text overlay, and the rest of the tutorial is just flat-out wrong.

I was less pleased to see that the Skill Trainer is still poorly-maintained and half-assed. The new "revamped" passing mode is not tutorialized anywhere, nor is the new kickoff rules and mechanics. The "updated" tutorial for the new kicking meter is literally just an extra text overlay inserted before the text from previous years' field goal and punt tutorials. The field goal kicking tutorial still claims that the kick meter will show the full arc and landing spot of the ball, and that the trajectory will sway with the wind -- none of which is still true. There's also no explanation of how the accuracy meter works, or of the overcharge penalty. So once again, EA is showing little-to-no consideration for tutorializing its new mechanics.

When John Madden was originally approached by EA about consulting with them on a new 7-on-7 football video game, he insisted that the game be "simulation football". He wanted authentic, 11-on-11 gameplay that could potentially be used as a tool for teaching the sport of football. It was the only way that he was willing to put his name on the product, and EA held fairly true to the philosophy of "simulation football" through the 90's and into the 2000's.

I think John Madden's last major contributions to the video game were around 2008, when he provided commentary and narration for the "Madden IQ" Skill Trainer. It wasn't long after this that EA's dedication to "simulation football" began to wane. A few years later, Ultimate Team was added to the game, Franchise Mode was gutted and replaced with a stripped down "My Careers" mode, and Madden himself stopped providing commentary for the game. Franchise Mode and core gameplay have been largely neglected in the years since, in favor of introducing terrible story modes, expanding the arcadey Ultimate Team mode, and adding even more arcadey game modes like SuperStar KO and 5-on-5 The Yard. The Madden video game series has fallen far from the goals and priorities of its namesake -- a fall that is made even more tragic and frustrating by an exclusivity deal with the NFL that bars any other company from producing an NFL-licensed "simulation" football game.

Madden 23 starts off with a tribute to the life of John Madden, who passed away this past December.

It's fitting that, with John Madden himself having passed away this past year, EA Sports and Tiburon seems to be trying to honor him by taking the video game back to basics and finally, after years of neglect, trying to address long-standing issues with the on-field gameplay, physics, and A.I.. Is it enough to satisfy the "simulation" expectations of John Madden, himself? Spoiler alert: NO.

Back to Simulation Football?

Madden 23 starts off well enough. The very first thing that the game asks the user to do is play through a tutorial of the new charge-up passing mechanics (largely ripped-off from Legend Bowl). Madden doesn't simply throw the user into a live game situation and expect new players to just know how to play -- though, expecting users to already know how to play the game from last year was always a sad testament to how little had changed in Madden from year to year.

After finishing the tutorial and deciding how difficult I want the passing mechanic to be, Madden 23 threw me directly into a demo "Legend Game". It's a Pro Bowl of All-Madden players from throughout NFL history, with 2 versions of John Madden coaching each respective team. The entire game is largely an excuse to let the commentary team of Charles Davis and Brandon Gaudin give a history lesson about John Madden's career and celebrate his accomplishments. My partner commented that I'd been playing for 15 minutes and she was already sick of listening to the game flagellate John Madden. Personally, I was more annoyed that the game defaulted to Pro difficulty, so scoring was relatively easy for me, and the CPU Tom Brady threw 3 interceptions. Each score and turnover interrupted the commentary about Madden's career, preventing me from hearing the unique dialogue, which the commentary team would not return to if an interruption occurred.

Madden 23 tutorializes its new mechanics before throwing users into a game situation.

Whatever. The game itself is mildly entertaining. It uses clips and graphics from older Madden games as part of its presentation, some NFL Films music, and it includes old commentary clips of Madden himself introducing some of his favorite players, from Brett Favre to Tom Brady to Tony Gonzalez. It's as good and fitting a tribute to the ol' coach and commentator as I would have expected to see in a video game, short of playing through some kind of story mode and re-living moments from his actual career.

But that's just the tutorial and demo game. Is the rest of the actual game as fitting a tribute to the man who demanded "simulation football" from video games bearing his likeness?

UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2016: LATEST PATCH AND/OR TUNER HAVE PRACTICALLY RUINED THE GAME FOR ME.

I've been having miserable experiences with Madden 17 since publishing this review. I suspect that either patch #2 or tuner #2 are the culprit. CPU QBs have become robots that have 80% completion percentages every game. Running the ball has become impossible (for both human and CPU teams). Man coverage simply doesn't work at all, making corner routes, in routes, out routes, and slant routes unstoppable. The throw out of sack mechanic has been tuned down to the point of being irrelevant. And the list goes on...

Sliders don't seem to improve the experience at all. In fact, certain sliders (like CPU QB Accuracy and CPU Pass Blocking) don't seem to have any effect at all anymore. I am tempted to rewrite this review with a much lower score (Somewhere in the range of a D or D-), but I'm hoping that EA will fix the problem - or at the very least, that deleting the most recent Tuner data will resolve some of the issues. Sadly, I don't think it's possible for me to re-download the first tuner data. This is a shame, since that one actually did fix some genuine problems the game had at launch.

DO NOT DOWNLOAD PATCH #2 OR TUNER #2!

Electronic Arts has supposedly spent the last three years or so rebuilding Madden from the ground up. Because of that, the past few years' games have felt very incremental, and somewhat incomplete. It was obvious that there were still major holes in many facets of gameplay. Personally, I would have preferred that EA just take a two or three year hiatus in order to hold off on releasing a game until it was actually complete. I'm happy that it seems like we're finally getting a "finished" version of EA's vision of a "next gen" Madden game, and I was curious to see if it would live up to expectations.

By their own admission, EA has finally rebuilt the final few phases of gameplay that still used predominantly legacy code (e.g. special teams and the football itself). For the first time in a long time, it feels like Madden can be approached and reviewed as a complete retail product rather than one step in a long-term incremental beta process. Is it worth the wait?

We'll, first impressions let it down a bit. Much like last year's game, the introduction and tutorial for Madden 17 seemed like a pointless waste of time that misrepresents the actual content of the game with its frequent cutscenes and dialogue from players and coaches. I'm not sure who these scripted gameplay intros are intended for. I would expect that new players would likely be confused and unsure what to do, resulting in failing the intro without any clue what they did wrong or what they were supposed to do. Experienced players, on the other hand, are probably just annoyed with the lack of control in this sequence. The inability to skip the cutscenes only makes repeat playthroughs (if you care enough to try to actually beat the scenario) feel tedious, as you'll have to sit through more cringe-worthy dialogue. EA Sports / Tiburon isn't Naughty Dog, and so writing dialogue and directing voice actors are not the studio's strong suits. About the only thing that this intro sequence does is highlight the new commentary team, which is actually pretty good.

Slowly becoming a complete football game

Despite the blocked field goal in the intro being an un-playable cutscene, special teams was one of the primary areas of focus this year. It's an area that's been mostly neglected since the analog kick meter was introduced back around 2007. And what was the innovation that EA decided was necessary to bring their kicking game into the next generation? Well, actually, they decided to bring back a kicking meter that works almost identically to the older PS1 / PS2 era games. You start the meter charging by pressing X, then press X again to set the kick strength as the meter fills, then press X again to set the kick accuracy as the meter returns to the bottom. Nothing new here.

The "new" kick meter is basically a return to the older kick meter.

However, you now have to hold the analog stick to aim the kick prior to starting the kick meter. If you let go, the kick trajectory will snap back to the default. This does require a bit more dexterity than either of the previous kick meter systems ever needed, but it's still fairly easy once you get used to it. Though, EA could maybe loosen up the accuracy window for online games because any amount of lag makes the kicking game virtually impossible. You also have to be more careful with timing your kicks, as the game and play clocks both continue to tick while the kick meter is charging. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature... So be careful that you don't wait too long and give yourself a delay of game (or let the game clock expire before) you get the kick off.

On the other side of the ball, defenders can now actually block kicks by jumping the snap...