Madden NFL 25 - PS5 Review

EA Sports College Football 25 by developer and publisher Electronic Arts—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes 

Another year, another Madden. Is it more of the same or something new and exciting? It’s the yearly question, and your mileage may vary depending on the aspects of the game that matter most. For my money though, Madden NFL 25 brings enough new to the table this year to warrant a good, long look.

Not every new year of Madden is a win. Sometimes they introduce a new mechanic that sounded better on paper than execution (we’re looking at you old QB passing cone or fumble minigames), or even take steps backwards in the presentation (audio glitches or crazy physics bugs). It feels however, that Madden NFL 25 has settled quite comfortably into this generation console technology and ironed out many of the wrinkles.

The initial first impression for me is a good one. Menus are easier to navigate, visuals are crisp, modes load quickly. If there’s a grumble, it’s how the game seems to want to funnel me into the Madden Money Making Mode… erm, Madden Ultimate Team (MUT) mode. For those unfamiliar with that mode (which likely means you haven’t played any sports games in the last decade), it’s a mash-up of sports card collecting, fantasy football and a wide variety of challenges. This all leads into a very grindy gameplay loop of beat challenge, get a small amount of currency, someday get enough currency to purchase another item or pack of cards, incrementally improve your roster and then do it all over again. There’s a very slow lather, rinse and repeat vibe to MUT. I don’t really care for it myself, but it’s popular and it offers micro-transactions that allow the progression loop to be sped up artificially. 

There are other modes including some quick play options, but the real meaty ones are Franchise and Career modes. The former is structured very similar to years past (and that’s reflected even in the game’s trophies / achievements, which haven’t seen a meaningful update in years now). The gist is that you are a coach or owner who tries to manage the weekly operations of the football team. At the owner level you’re setting prices and worrying about the quality of the stadium, while the coach is more focused on the X’s and O’s and game strategy. Both are basically slightly different skinned approaches to the same core engine where you try to improve your team and live out a fantasy football world.

Franchise is easily where I spend the majority of my time in Madden, both this year and the releases of the past. It’s just the most rewarding experience overall as I enjoy so many of the team management aspects. The offseason feels a bit better this year, especially the draft aspects. It’s not exactly a major reinvention of the wheel though, and I feel like there’s room to do something ‘more’ with a narrative or elements of league-wide chaos: players holding out mid-contract, or teammates not getting along, or players beefing with one another from different squads, etc. I don’t really know, but as fun as Franchise is, it could use a little more ‘texture’ for lack of a better way to phrase it.

It's impossible not to reference the recent EA Sports CollegeFootball 25 game. There’s a lot of elements that have made their way from that game from a couple of months ago into this new Madden NFL 25. The Dynasty mode of College is the parallel to Madden’s Franchise, but they are very different animals. I will say that I am disappointed that there’s no draft class export from the college game to the Madden one. I imagine it’s more of a licensing limitation than a technical one, as we had that option way back on the PlayStation 2, but I hope it’s a hurdle that can be overcome next year as this was something of a major disappointment for myself and some of my football loving friends.

Now, one area where the College game transitions well into the Madden series is the created player mode. Your can import your graduated college player into the pro game and it will give you a slightly accelerated start into the process, pulling in your physical choices, numbers preference, things like that. It’s a fun way to keep the journey going. I really enjoyed this year’s Career mode. There is a lack of story / narrative told here, as your player just sort of graduates from college into the NFL and gets to go through the combine which culminates into a clumsy hug with the NFL commissioner after a team selects your player.

I do think it would be cool if you could create a bit of a backstory for your player (or import one from College football, such as the blue chip vs underdog starting points), but there’s numerous objectives sprinkled into Career mode. These dangling carrots are generally enjoyable targets as you level up your player and sink points and earned skills into him. There’s a lot of opportunity to put your own personal spin on the player in interviews / conversations, though the impacts feel very short-lived. Again, I think those choices could be interesting if woven into some sort of story or ongoing narrative (not even a super firm story, but just more than a +5 boost to stiff arms next week).

It's also interesting to me how College football put training wheels on your created player in the form of limited play calling impact while Madden lets your player (in my case, the very same halfback) have total control of the playbook. It seems a weird approach that swings too wildly from one extreme to the other. There is also the online-ish (there’s offline challenges too) sub-mode called Showcase where you play a much faster, simpler, more arcade-like game of football. It’s interesting, but hard for me to invest as much time into than the core NFL career of my player. 

All of these modes and menus are well and good, but Madden NFL 25 seems to be at its best when you’re playing the actual game of football. The visuals are better than ever, which is to be expected. I appreciate the better variety in the announcers in the game. The primary commentators are still Brandin Gaudin and Charles Davis, who are just fine – but they’ve been growing a bit stale over the last few years. EA has injected Greg Olsin and Mike Tirico as well as Kate Scott and Brock Huard. It’s a welcome bit of variety that’s been well overdue and the presentation benefits from it.

It's interesting to note that in many ways, Madden NFL 25 feels slower to me than the College game. I'd love to know if that’s a reality of the engine, or maybe just a matter of perception on my part. Maybe there’s more parity in the pro players and therefore you don’t feel breakaway speed the way I did playing the college game where players might have much larger physical gaps? Either way, even with that impression, Madden’s collisions are fantastic, and that’s no small matter.

In a sport where you have two teams of eleven banging into one another all of the time, the tech behind these collisions is kind of a big deal. This year introduces what the team at EA has dubbed Boom physics. There are still some goofy animations here and there that occur, but nothing like some of the wonkiness of years past where a small player could chuck aside a behemoth twice his size, or a football kicked through the stadium roof. Instead everything feels much more grounded in reality when players hit one another. Actually, there’s moments before and after the hit as well where you see a player’s body shift to brace for a big hit stick tackle across the middle, or when they put their hand on the ground to stand up slowly after getting shmucked by a linebacker. 

 

It's not always perfect, but by and large the limbs and bodies flail and thud in convincing fashion and blockers engage and disengage in a realistic way, but the ball has physics too. The ball can sit on the ground as a player bumps into it and knocks it around, but not like vacuumed right into their chest. Ditto balls bounced around as they can deflect off of hands (or backs or legs) in ways that it didn’t used to back in the day when the PS3 Madden passes would just laser into a person’s hands.

Madden NFL 25 is an excellent sports title, and though many of the improvements are incremental, they are numerous enough to be noteworthy. It’s far more than a roster update, but there’s still room to add some flavor to the various modes, and I’d like to see a stronger connection between the two EA football titles in the future. That being said, there’s more than enough quality football to be had here to keep NFL fans entertained for quite some time.

Score: 7.5 / 10