It’s that time of the season again, pumpkin everything, leafs on the ground, and of course a new Madden NFL 15. Now I will be honest here as your reviewer, I care more about pumpkin flavored things than I do football. I am a Cleveland Browns fan, so my football season consists of high hopes and dashed dreams. That, however, does not mean that there is no enjoyment playing Madden‘s newest release on the new generation of hardware. I just look at it differently, instead of seeing this game as an amazing sports simulator, I see it as a way for me to take Johnny Football to the Super Bowl with my Browns. And that is exactly what I’m attempting to do with the game. That’s not all you can accomplish with the newest Madden, the amount of content to be unlocked is immense, and it’s all nice and shiny thanks to next gen.
When you first start the game you are thrust in the final moments of the 2015 NFC Championship game between the Carolina Panthers and the Seattle Seahawks. It is your job to take the ball to the end-zone and get to the Super Bowl as the Panthers. This allows you your first taste of the graphics and what to expect henceforth, a game that may confuse onlookers into thinking they are watching a real game. This scene also throws you into the offensive action, while very little change has been made in the offensive control scheme, it still takes a bit of trial and error to get use to. To hike the ball you press X then your receivers all run down the field and their corresponding button on the controller will light up when they are ready for the ball. To rocket the ball to them you hold down their corresponding button, and to lob it to them, while to get it past a defender you just tap the corresponding button. Very easy to figure out and master, even for a newbie like myself. Needless to say I managed to defeat the reigning Superbowl champions and make my way to the big game.
The defense controls is where EA really made the change in Madden 2015. Now, when you are on defense you can press up on your D-Pad to bring you around to your side of the ball where you can read the players and figure out what kind of play the opposing team will run. When the ball is hiked as a defensive lineman you tap R2 to initiate a move with the offensive lineman, then you tap X or square to disengage and get to the quarterback for a sack. Once you disengage you can sidestep left and right to track the offensive player with L2, the you can tackle nicely with X or aggressively with square. What makes the tackling even better is that a cone appears when the player is close enough to make the tackle. The wider area shows the player where they can make a conservative tackle, while the darker, thinner area of the cone lets them know where they can make an aggressive tackle. The new controls makes playing defense significantly better and more immersive. Being a newbie playing with Browns I successfully held the Seattle Seahawks to only a field goal during one of my first go arounds with the game, so anyone can master these defensive controls.
Let’s talk about the graphics in this game, which are amazing. The football fields look real and the fans that populate it could easily have come from Soldier Field. The player builds are fantastic and lifelike, even a majority of the faces through the helmet look exactly like the player. The only person that I’ve seen that doesn’t fully look correct is Pete Carroll, I don’t know why but they didn’t seem to capture him correct in the scanner. Other than that little weirdness, the game looks great running on the PS4. The character animations are fun too, but they do begin to repeat themselves after you play for awhile, which can get humorous. A few people have even been tricked into thinking I’m watching a real game instead of playing, but then they have realized there isn’t a commercial every five minutes and have thus caught onto my ruse.
There are two main campaigns, for lack of a better word, that you can play through: the Connected Franchise and Madden Ultimate Team. I tried Connected Franchise and opted for the online version, sadly without PS+ I haven’t been able use that option, which has been disappointing. Instead I’ve opted to play the offline option, which is where the game asks you if you want to take a player, owner or coach through their career. I of course, have chose to do mine with Johnny Manziel and thus commenced my rookie season. Seeing that I haven’t played a Madden game in over six years, I have stuck with the easiest difficulty of the game, Rookie. If you’re better than me you can play on one of the other three difficulties, Pro, All-Pro or All-Madden, all three notch up the difficulty, so choose wisely. After you play through a few downs the controls become very easy, I’ve begun to trounce the big named teams with my Browns arsenal, and I’ve never felt better.
The other campaign you can play is the Madden Ultimate Team, where you build the best team suited to the type of football you like to play. I chose long ball passing and the game shuffled its deck of players and gave me my team. Most of the players I’d never heard of, but they seemed to do well as I played, the more you play in MUT, the more cards you unlock and the better your team will get. This is where the majority of content is, the first area where you play games has 33 games to play, the next one has two hundred and fifty six games for your enjoyment. That is a lot of football, but I guess if you want your Ultimate team, you’re going to have to play for a bit. I’m guessing I’ll be playing for some time until I get Kosar, Montana and Rice.
While this game is mostly promoted and marketed toward huge football fans, normal gamers like myself can definitely find some enjoyment in it. It is fun seeing the team you built in MUT go all the way to the big game, and even more fun to see who is in the deck of cards your purchased with your points. It is also a blast taking any one of the 32 teams all the way to the big game, especially your favorite team. To sports fans this is a real time football simulator, whereas to gamers, this is a complex role playing game with football involved. Either way this is definitely a game you should pick up if you find your PS4 game collection wanting, it is a great addition. The graphics, controls and large amount of content should be enough to clear a space on your shelf for this latest and prettiest Madden yet.