Madden NFL 25 Review

Some people say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I know what they mean, because every year, I play Madden. If football is a game of inches, then Madden typically manages to perfectly recapture that feeling in the minutiae of its year-to-year iterations. Every August, fans sit around and obsessively try to figure out what has changed, if the under-the-hood adjustments actually matter, if the new systems do what EA says they do, and if things truly feel any better. However, this year things feel very different than they do in Madden NFL 24 on the field – and I don’t need to bring out the chains to see that Madden NFL 25 has made good progress in that regard. But once you step off the gridiron, the same old problems rear their ugly head another year in a row. Deja vu, all over again.

The big new on-field change is BOOM Tech, which revamps the way animations work when players collide. Functionally, it breaks down collisions and tackles into several smaller animations that take individual player ratings, strength, weight, force, velocity, angle, and momentum into account during each play. Sounds like marketing lingo, right? It’s not. Outcomes are much more unpredictable (in a good way) with BOOM Tech, and I’ve seen more unique tackle animations in the week I’ve spent with Madden 25 than I did during the entirety of my time with Madden 24. Now, the bigger player with better stats doesn’t always win. Instead, you get more highlight reel catches (and picks), more defenders bouncing off running backs during big, bruising runs, and more whiffed tackles because someone took a bad angle. It rules.

Madden NFL 24 makes several much-needed improvements to the on-field experience thanks to fantastic additions to animations and AI, but it still suffers from the same problems it always has once you get off the field: everything here is just done better in every other sports sim, even the other ones made by EA, and this year’s tweaks just aren’t enough to make up for the series’ continued feeling of sameness and lack of progress. To continue the metaphor, Madden feels like a decent but not great football team: content to coast. If it were in the right division I could see it sneaking into the playoffs, or overperforming in a good year. But it’s the kind of team that typically gets eliminated in the first round. The on-field game might be the best it’s ever been, but there are too many off-field issues here to ignore, and with each passing year it feels more and more like they’ll never be fixed. Perpetually, Madden seems like it could be a contender with time and the right changes, but right now it feels like an also-ran. And you don’t win the Super Bowl like that. - Will Borger, August 22, 2023

The new system affects ball carriers, too. Running backs now “get skinny” when they hit holes and ball carriers brace for and turn away from incoming contact. The new system also allows you to chain together ball carrier moves to create “let’s watch that again” plays where you’re juking defensive players out of their shoes.

BOOM Tech also changes Madden’s beloved (infamous?) Hit Stick. If you use it too early, too late, or from a bad angle, you’re more likely to blow past the guy you’re trying to tackle or bounce off of them. But if you time it right, you’ll blow them up and be more likely to force a fumble. Best of all, you’re getting real-time feedback on what you did right (or wrong) on every Hit Stick attempt so you’ll always know why things play out the way they do. When you pull off a great play, it feels awesome. When you mess up, it feels awful, but fair. That’s the way it should be, and BOOM Tech makes it possible.

Other welcome on-field changes will make you feel right at home if you’ve played College Football 25. You can now choose specific coverage shells like Cover 2, Cover 3, and so on when disguising your defense instead of choosing between base and man alignments (though you can still set those in coaching adjustments), adjust the depth of your receivers’ routes in one or five-yard increments, shift both sides of your line independently, try for one-handed catches that expand your catch radius but decrease your chance to come down with the ball, and use the new Multi-Meter for kicking – all improvements that made their debut in College Football 25. Madden 25 even feels closer in terms of speed, which I like. I personally hate using the Multi-Meter, but all these options are welcome because they give you more control over what happens during a play. One thing that, shockingly, didn’t make the jump from College Football 25 is running out the clock automatically when you kneel down if a game is mathematically over. It’s a weird (and annoying) omission.

Meanwhile, the new kickoff rules feel… really weird. Now, nobody can start running until the returner on the receiving team catches the ball. I don’t like that because it doesn’t allow for as many explosive returns, but that’s an NFL problem, not necessarily a Madden problem. Either way, it will take a while to get used to.

If there’s one thing I don’t enjoy about Madden 25’s on-field action, it’s that (once again, like College Football 25) there’s less on-field feedback. The legacy kick meter used to tell you when you’d nailed a perfectly timed kick. It doesn’t anymore. When you threw a pass, you used to get feedback telling you how it went, whether your timing was good, whether you were throwing out of a sack or under pressure in a way that affected your accuracy, and so on. None of that is here in Madden 25, which is odd given the updated Hit Stick feedback. I’m not a fan.

Still, that tactical chess match coupled with split-second decision making are the best parts of Madden, and it’s hard to argue that this iteration isn’t — say it with me — better on the field than it has ever been. The problems off the field, however, are pretty much the same as they’ve been for the last few years, though there are some key changes there, too.

EA has been hyping up Madden 25’s updated looks, and honestly, that’s where its improvements are most immediately clear. The menus are much cleaner – your options are big, clearly delineated, and easy to understand, and, miraculously, largely lag-free. This may not seem like a big deal, but if you played Madden 24 at launch, it feels like mana from heaven. It truly is the little things. My wife, who specializes in UX design and has watched me play entirely too much Madden 24 over the last year, walked by while I was playing this year’s iteration and casually remarked that “this looks like an actual menu designed by an actual person.” Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. They heard us.

All right, Will. Yeah, new menus. Big whoop. Tell us about something more substantial than that. Well, dear reader, the major modes benefit from this new focus on presentation, too, and I feel like a lot of what’s good here can similarly be traced directly back to the improvements we saw in College Football 25. In Franchise mode, you can finally create female coaches, and there are more customization options than ever before in terms of heads and apparel. There are still only 10 head options for women compared to 40 for men, but it’s cool that they’ve been added at all.

Superstar mode (which allows you to import your player from College Football 25) also benefits from this new coat of paint, despite ditching the pretense of an opening storyline and voice acting entirely, which is a shame. The upside is that once you complete the Combine, things get better. The draft actually looks and feels like the NFL draft. When the almighty Joe Throw got drafted by the Falcons 8th overall, Roger Goodell, the most hated man in football, came out and hugged him before presenting him with a Falcons jersey and posing for a picture — just like in real life. Did Joe look like some hideous golem animated by black magic compared to the mute, wax figure of Madden 25’s Roger Goodell? Yes. Does that matter? Not really. It still looks a hell of a lot better than what we had, and I appreciated all of the additional customization options when recreating Joe Throw in Madden 25.

Once I was in the Falcons facility, I walked around with head coach Raheem Morris, and we discussed my goals for the preseason. Again, it’s a little weird to see everyone’s mouths move and have no sound come out, but graphically? Way better than last year, and I appreciated the moment-to-moment visual updates, whether I was chatting with my teammates in the locker room or out on the field. No longer are we trapped in hotel rooms.

Speaking of the field, there’s some neat stuff to see here, too. Things just look better all around, whether it’s character models, animations before, during, and after plays, or the new and improved touchdown graphics that pull up the scoring player’s photo. Again, it’s the little things.

Not everything’s a home run here, however; I hate the new play arts, at least the ones we see in the playbook. They’re harder to parse than the ones in Madden 24 and, conveniently, look just like the ones in College Football 25. They can’t all be zingers, I guess, but man, these can’t be replaced fast enough.

I also like that there are more mini-games to play, and that there are finally mini-games for O-linemen you can use to Focus Train them in Franchise mode. I don’t particularly enjoy these mini-games, admittedly, but at least they’re there and I can use them. Overall, the mini-games here are hands down an improvement over Madden 24, but still something I do to train my players and nothing else. Getting messages from my GM when I’m playing as a coach in my Franchise is also a nice touch, and I’m a big fan of the new commentary teams, particularly Kate Scott and Brock Huard, though they’re not as detailed in their commentary as the classic duo of Brandon Gaudin and Charles Davis. But they’re here, and options are nice. (Say it with me: it’s the little things.)

So yeah, the new presentation is good, but it’s also stuff that should have been here years ago. Better late than never, I guess, but all of this just emphasizes how much catch-up Madden has to play to meet the bare minimum. You know how you feel when you order food at a restaurant and it takes forever to arrive at your table? This is like that. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy it’s here, but it should not have taken this long – especially when there’s still work left to do.

As far as modes go, Madden 25 is exactly the same as Madden 24. You’ve got the EA Money Machine that is Ultimate Team, which, to the surprise of absolutely no one, is getting more seasons (eight total) than ever before, not that it needs them. It’s still a Skinner Box, the challenges are still boring, and it’s still predatory in its monetization practices. There is a new head-to-head mode that takes your playstyle and skill level into account when matching you with opponents, but this is still a pay-to-win mode designed to either drain your bank account or keep you grinding. It’s Ultimate Team. I don’t hate myself enough to do more than pop in for this review, confirm it’s the same unappealing thing it’s always been, and leave – and beyond that, I don’t know what to say.

The other modes, presentation upgrades aside, are the same. Superstar benefits from new storylines and such, but it’s still not interesting enough to keep my attention and I still miss Longshot. The Skills Trainer is still great, but it’s also getting a little long in the tooth and could use some love. Superstar Showdown is a fun novelty, and little else. Franchise is still the name of the game, and while the ability to sort draft prospects by specific ratings and the presentation updates are nice, it’s still many yards behind other, similar modes in other sports games, and in it still need ofs more love than it got. The more things change…