This year's Madden NFL 15 observes another important milestone: the 10th edition under the exclusive license of the National Football League.
Dispatches from across the pond suggested the World Cup in Brazil was bringing a halcyon age for football in the United States. But as the previously soccer-shy Americans were embracing the heroics of Tim Howard and Clint Dempsey, the most popular sports in the States was plotting its own contribution to the global sporting exchange. The NFL, more than ever before, is becoming a worldwide brand, reaching out from its homeland to thrill fans, perplex the dubious and maybe convert those that stand somewhere in the middle.
During the current NFL season, which began last Thursday with no little fanfare, three of the league’s most important games will be played at Wembley. Match-ups that have sold out the 80,000-seater stadium at a pace that would make the beleaguered England soccer team blush. American football (or gridiron, if you prefer) is a marvellous sport of ferocious strength and pace, full of moments of individual brilliance, showboating pomp and strategic nous. But it is a fairly complex game, so explaining its nuances is paramount to expanding its success. Madden NFL 15 — a video game that has possibly the closest partnership to the sport it represents— feels part of the charm-offensive. Its opening menus supply both tutorials on how the Madden works on a mechanical level but, more significantly, some extensive education on the ‘concepts of football’. There are scores of these lessons that do a fine job of tutoring you in the hows and whys of various tactics: explaining the minutiae of the defensive cover position, how and when to run offensive screens or when to switch up at the line of scrimmage when you recognise a defensive blitz coming your way.
By their nature, these interactive lessons aren’t the most thrilling aspect of Madden, but they are key for the casual fan that may want to go a little deeper on their knowledge. The tutelage bleeds into the game too, should you want it. Prior to selecting a play, you have the choice of the ever-present coaching suggestions, but now they’re expanded to give statistical reasoning to each recommendation.
So you will be presented with a half-back dive on 2nd and medium because it’s successful a good percentage of the time for a decent yard gain. Or you’ll line up in a screen formation because statistically the opposition will choose a comparatively vulnerable defence at this stage of the game. The game also collates successful community picks and your own favourite plays the longer you spend with the game.
You can also use the ‘Coach Stick’ to compare player stats in traffic light style, possibly influencing the decision of which rush to take or which pass to make. It helps, of course, that the on-field action is a significant improvement on recent Maddens. The series had fallen away somewhat, particularly when compared to the success of stablemates FIFA and NHL.
15, though, feels like Madden back on an upwards curve following the relatively lacklustre 25th anniversary edition last year. It looks tremendous, of course, with sleek detailed on-field visuals and an excellent broadcast presentation let down only by supine commentary.Madden 15’s most significant on-field change comes in playing defence. Or, more accurately, making defence playable.
Previous years have seen defence coming down to choosing the play and largely letting the dice fall where they may. Now, perhaps inspired by the Seattle Seahawks’ Superbowl-winning Legion of Boom (a ferocious defensive line of 350lb brutes), defence is a lot more fun to play and more easy to influence. It allows you to lock yourself to one player and snap the camera to his back, making it much easier to read the offence and perform your role in the play. There are small touches to get you more involved, a quick button press at the right time to set your linebacker moving at the right speed, and context sensitive actions to shrug off your blocker.Madden NFL 15's most significant on-field change is the much improved defensive playIt’s good stuff, bringing the thrill of a well-executed sack that Madden previously left to chance and discouraging you from simulating to the next time you have the ball. Still, offence is still where you’ll have most of your fun and the improved play-calling and interpretation help things along.
There’s a fine art to the way the camera sweeps, pass options stand out and play diagrams are projected onto the field. The visual feedback brings a strange rush, like you are in the head of your quarterback and picking out the right pass, or then skipping through the field with your receiver is a real thrill.
On the flip-side, Madden isn’t the most stringent of simulations and there are irritations that come from its focus on speed and brawn. Quarterbacks, in particular, do not have the manoeuvrability of their real-life counterparts. Watch the best NFL playmakers and you’ll see them skipping tackles and dipping out of the pocket to find the space to pass, whereas here they are more leaden-footed than you’d like. This is exacerbated somewhat by the fact that tackles hardly ever miss. Taken as a whole, this often ends with games being rather low-scoring affairs in comparison to reality.Still, despite the scorers being underworked, Madden retains a fondness for showreel moments that make it a pleasure to play. And this year the AI on both sides seems smarter. Opposition are cunning with plays and have smart clock management, while your own receivers and blockers do their best to adapt to the state of play around them.Madden isn’t shy with its modes either.
The Ultimate Team mode in which you build a fantasy team, continues to expand, while Connected Franchise lets you take control of either a single player, coach or owner (where you can set hot dog prices and decide on stadium expansion). The downside to the Franchise mode is that player progression is a rather clunky chore —with you administering training hours via a menu— which I often forewent to get to the action.But then the action is very good. Madden still has its foibles that mean its perhaps not as accomplished as some of its sporting peers, but 15 feels like a significant step forward. Not only in terms of mechanics, but in terms of improving players knowledge and skill at the game through finesse and feedback.
While there is still some work to be done, it is a game that wants you to come in, have fun and perhaps go away with a greater appreciation of the sport its attempting to simulate. In all of this, Madden NFL 15 is a success.
Madden NFL 15's intro is a sight to behold. Presented with that particular tone of intense, hackneyed masculinity that's fallen out of fashion outside the sport of American football, the sequence works as an accurate barometer for your satisfaction of what's to come. Enjoy it and you'll love Madden 15; despise it and this is not for you.The reason for that stark differentiation comes down to what Madden has, once again, chosen to focus on. As with previous games in the series, there's an incredible emphasis on speed, creating a playing experience that only partially replicates what you see from the NFL on Sundays.All the big plays and the boisterous excitement they bring are here - and are a joy to execute. In the game's dedication to getting you to those primetime moments, however, much of the subtlety of this complex team sport tends to get lost in the pomp.This is most obviously felt when switching between different quarterbacks. Peyton Manning is one of the most revered players of all time; he will go down in history not only as a sportsman of immense talent but as one of the hallowed few responsible for changing the way we think about the quarterback position. While his throwing ability in Madden 15 is beyond reproach, his lack of speed makes him a liability in a way you'd never associate with his real-life self.
Player models for the more famous NFL stars are almost eerily realistic, the dead eyes creating a ghostly effect.He simply cannot avoid the pressure of rushing linebackers and defensive ends in the game, a ridiculous turn of events given his actual ability to intelligently avoid the rush. This kind of brain-over-brawn football ability is in no way recreated in Madden 15, preventing Peyton Manning from feeling like Peyton Manning.For the sheer range of options he provides at the quarterback position, the Washington Redskins' Robert Griffin III is a superior option to Manning. Simply writing that line makes me feel like I've committed a sin.
Griffin is nowhere close to Manning in reality and he never will be, but he does have the speed to avoid defenders and keep plays alive.Given how glaringly obvious the dominance of speed has been for so many years in Madden games, you would have thought the design team would have fixed it by now. Clearly, they don't want to.
This comes back to that intro; this is very much a game aimed at those looking for the thrill of gameday. It's not a simulator and it's not aimed at the American football elitist - not that there is an alternative game to turn to.
Is it me, or do Cam Newton's hands look too small? How does he manage to wrap those around a football?That's not to say that horizons haven't been broadened since last year's confusingly titled and stagnantly designed Madden NFL 25. Undoubtedly, Madden 15 is a superior prospect and in many ways is the game we should have been offered last season, given the opportunities then first presented by the Xbox One and PS4 hardware.Playing on defense, for instance, is a task only now worth engaging with. For the first time ever in a Madden game, your individual actions while defending actually matter - from where you decide to position the player you're in control of, to when you decide to react to the snap, to how quickly you are able to read the motion and intent of your opponent's play-by-play gameplan.Much of this impact is achieved by simply allowing you to move the camera behind your own defensive players, mirroring the angle you use while on offense. The rest comes from you having to rely less on the AI to make things happen for you, a change of tack most welcomingly felt during online matches against players good enough to befuddle the game's algorithms at will.
Despite what this image suggests, you sadly can't bust a move in an attempt to intimidate/sicken the opposition.The New York Giants are not the defensive powerhouses they used to be, but defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul still has the singular ability - when under your control - to wreak havoc across offensive lines. This is thanks to a new control scheme that puts all of his actions under your direct control; no longer are the winners and losers of individual battles determined by disenchanting dice rolls influenced by the players' stats.Pressing the trigger as soon as the offense has snapped the ball allows you to launch quickly off the line of scrimmage; time it perfectly and you give yourself a chance to catch your opposing guard flatfooted, breezing past him and straight into the quarterback's face.
If you do get blocked, then the face buttons perform power and finesse moves to get past your nemesis, while the left stick allows you to push them out of the way to give a teammate more space to burst past. Similarly detailed actions exist for linebackers and cornerbacks, too, the defensive position you decide to take up likely coming down to which player is your favourite.Welcome as they are, these new defensive abilities still primarily revolve around speed. Faster defenders can recover more quickly from mistakes, cover more of the field and block gaps in the lines more readily. There are bigger, slower defenders that boast better tackling attributes, but tackles miss so infrequently that it makes little sense to select them. Choosing a mediocre tackler with a 90-plus speed attribute will see greater success than a tackling machine with sub-80 speed. Again, this generally stands at odds with the reality of the NFL.
Adrian Peterson's combination of speed and strength continues to make him almost impossible to defend against. Trade everything you have to get him on your team.Much closer to reality are the tweaks made to how, and what, information is presented within games.
The new 'Coach Stick' (an idea borrowed from the seemingly defunct NCAA college football series) offers a basic review of how your receivers and running back match up against their respective defenders. A traffic light system communicates whether a particular battle is favourable, middling or bad for you - this information potentially influencing your likelihood of throwing risky passes. If the matchup is favourable, for instance, you might be more inclined to throw a 50/50 pass in the hope that your superior receiver will live up to his billing.Additionally, suggestions on which play to run make more sense for each given situation and, perhaps most importantly, manually trailing through the various formations to pick a specific play is less of a chore thanks to a more intuitive menu design. It's taken a very long while, but all the information you'd reasonably expect to be clearly shown in an American football game is finally being delivered in a way that works.Despite of all these steps forward, it's impossible to shake the feeling that this is the game we should have been playing last year. Many of the ideas on offer are promising rather than fully realised, making Madden 15 more a blueprint for the future than the finished article.
That's exactly what the first next-gen outing should have been; this second edition should then have built on and deepened the new ideas.Madden 15 a step forward, then, yet still a year behind schedule. There's a good game here, but there's still work to do to bring it up to the level of many of its sports game peers.7/10.