Madden 25 Review: Stalling in the Red Zone

If I compare the annual release of Madden to an NFL offense trying to put together a potential scoring drive, I rarely see Madden nailing those explosive plays that pick up huge chunks of yardage. Madden 25 fits into this analogy as well, making some strides and perhaps even racking up another first down or two but never producing the kind of game-changing plays that excite the masses and make life easier for an offense.

Instead, each Madden in the series represents another play in a slow, methodical march towards the end zone that only occasionally yields the triumph of a touchdown that’s widely celebrated by the community. Lacking in new features and rewarding refinements, there’s a real worry that Madden 25 shows the series could be ready to stall out at anytime on their long drive and have to settle for a field goal or, even worse, a punt.

Thankfully, there have been some noticeable improvements on the field, and while they may not exactly be transformative, they make the nuances of commanding an offense a little more gratifying. A further emphasis on having tackles and collisions between players make more sense from a physics perspective is seen all over the field. Superstar mode, which allows you to create and progress a player throughout his career, still lacks an engrossing storyline but there’s at least been some effort to give your career more direction, thanks at least in part to the introduction of Quests and an improved in-game grading system.

Madden 25‘s franchise mode has a revamped UI that’s organized better and some new cutscenes designed to invest more in your team’s success, however the choices that it has you make as a coach throughout a season are quite shallow. At least at launch, Madden 25 appears to be geared towards courting new players by making offense overpowered when compared to defense, which struggles mightily when playing zone coverages. Madden Ultimate Team, the requisite card-collecting mode of the series, hasn’t evolved all that much and is perhaps even more pay-to-win than ever.

Let’s break out the sticks and measure out where Madden 25 is exceeding expectations and in what other ways it’s coming up short this year.

Madden 25 Review

What I Like

Gameplay

Madden 25 aces the most basic test of all in that playing a game, whether against the CPU, an online adversary, or a friend on the couch next to you, is largely an immersive and fun experience with a bit more realism involved as well. Running the ball gives you the opportunity to squeeze through the smallest of holes when searching for the open field. You’re nearly as likely now to break out of a pack of linemen as you are to fall victim to the dreaded suction tackle that has been around since the dawn of Madden.

Though the revamped passing from EA Sports College Football 25 that gives you more control of the trajectory of your throws won’t be coming to Madden 25 for a bit, attacking through the air already shows promise. When you’re able to step up in the pocket to avoid the rush and then unleash a dart into a tight window to pick up a first down or touchdown, it feels incredible at times. There’s an increased emphasis on executing as perfectly as you can with your passing meter to thread the needle and avoid the kind of errant throws that can be knocked down, intercepted, or miss an open receiver entirely.

Animations

Since football is a sport where bodies of various sizes are coming together on every single snap, it’s been frustrating to see how Madden has often struggled on the Frostbite engine with portraying this authentically through canned animations. It’s nice to report then that they’re definitely edging closer to getting it right in Madden 25.

First off, players accelerate and then gradually slow as they tire in a way that’s more true to life for different position groups. When there are inevitable collisions, the ensuing animations appear to give greater consideration to the build of the players involved and the speed at which they’re moving. That leads to smaller defenders getting bowled over by bruising backs, players bouncing off each other, and ball carriers shaking free of stray arms that can only slow them down just long enough to allow other defenders to help out.

The moves you can pull off while running with the ball all come with a nice degree of risk and reward. A well-timed juke that crumples a would-be tackler in space and leaves them in your dust is plenty capable of creating some thrilling moments but only serves to slow you down when busted out at the wrong time.

Naturally, you won’t be able to evade every tackle and there’s an impressive array of new animations that can bring down ball-carriers. From the brute force of dragging someone to the hard turf to flying through the air like a torpedo to take out a runner’s legs, it’s nice to see another level of variety on display. There’s even a retooled Hit Stick (by the way, doesn’t it feel like there’s a new Hit Stick almost every year in Madden?) that can stop a runner in his tracks like a brick wall when unleashed at the right instant or have you looking like a fool when mistimed. Sure, it’s a bit of a bummer when you catch a glimpse of a familiar tackling animation that’s been kicking around in the series for a while, but you won’t see those quite as frequently as you did in the past.

Superstar

For better or worse, Superstar mode has leaned even further into swiping a page from the NBA 2K playbook by aping a lot of how the career mode from that series works, including the return of grading your player’s performance over the course of each game.

You can improve your grade by making plays at whatever position you’ve chosen (though you still aren’t able to be a defensive end, safety, or tight end) and will see your grade fall when you fail to do certain aspects of your position properly. This works relatively well for the most part in leaving you feeling that your final grade for a game matches how well you really played. However, as a running back, I’ve ended up with a D+ grade at the end of a game in which I ran for over 100 yards with a touchdown, all because of the severe punishment for not running routes perfectly (without any feedback to tell you what you did wrong on those routes either). These are the sorts of growing pains NBA 2K has experienced since introducing their grading system, as it’s not always accurate in both its negative and positive assessments of your behavior.

By racking up stats and achievements, you’ll be able to unlock the powerful X-Factor abilities when you complete Quests, another savvy crib from NBA 2K that’s new to the mode this year. Considering how much the mode seemingly wants to emulate NBA 2K, it’s in the cutscenes between games where Superstar really falls short. The conversations throughout your career rely entirely on reading all of your interactions with players and staff rather than hearing them. This removes a layer of humanity that could potentially connect you with what happens to your player, causing the entire narrative to come across as somewhat hollow. Strangely, it’s almost as if there was a decision to compensate for the lack of human speech with the largest subtitles imaginable to show what people are saying, and this gigantic font size can hardly be considered much of a substitute.

It’s difficult to call Superstar mode an unqualified success but there are at least signs that it’s headed in the right direction. Anyone who purchased EA Sports College Football 25 will likely be pleased with how you can import your created player from that game’s career mode, Road To Glory, and continue their story in the NFL. The way you can easily shuffle between playing games in the NFL as your created player and taking your skills online against others is neatly organized and deeper than you might initially expect.

Showdown, the online component of the Superstar mode, gives you several different arcade-style events to team up with a couple of friends online or just go it alone. As you level up and accrue skill points and abilities, you can use these on improving specific skills to mold your player into your preferred style of athlete. You’ll spend coins that you earn on items in the store that are mostly cosmetic in nature or else do what the game clearly wants you to do and spend some real money to get coveted items faster instead.

What I Don’t Like

Franchise

To give some credit where it’s due, there have at least been some new additions to franchise mode in Madden 25. There are now more cutscenes that will crop up throughout a season to task you as a coach with making decisions that will impact the development of your players. The problem is these scenarios that define your weeks are often vapid and arbitrary. You’ll be shown confronting a problem like how to stop an elite receiver on your next opponent’s team by addressing the team in a meeting with a game plan that essentially amounts to cover him well. The next week you might find your coach deciding whether to promise a neglected receiver that he’ll finish the season with either four touchdowns or five, with the latter ultimately rewarding you with more XP. Are we really expected to believe that these are the kinds of coaching tactics and motivational techniques that are being utilized within an NFL team’s facility?

In spite of this, there’s still the opportunity to have some fun within franchise mode (the improved gameplay certainly helps) and there is even a welcome innovation or two this year. From a cosmetic standpoint, the menus and presentation have improved, making it easier now to stay connected with what’s going on with both your team and the rest of the league. The mode itself though has an underlying foundation that’s remained unchanged for far too long while various aspects that have been retooled in recent years are somehow already showing their age.

The scouting system, for example, was only overhauled a few years back but has lost whatever novelty it initially had and you’re inevitably left wishing there was more you could do to determine draft booms and busts. The mode also continues to struggle with recreating accurate stats over the course of a season where most games are simulated. You’re bound to find that quarterbacks are more accurate than their real life counterparts while the top receivers in the league don’t usually put up the gaudy numbers that you’d expect.

On top of that, franchise mode plays different than play now games, so you’ll see some wild pass-run ratios between many CPU teams when you play them. This has been an issue for a couple years now, but it is more stark now because the playbooks themselves have received some impressive upgrades. The issue seems to be because there are lots of new motion plays and pass plays, many of the playbooks are now unbalanced in such a way where the AI just does not choose to run it often enough.

Defense

The issues on the defensive side of the ball at the launch of Madden 25 are indicative of a larger one within the realm of sports games recently. There has become this insidious tendency for developers to dumb the games down out of the box in an effort to attract newcomers and have the game be more immediately accessible. Whether it’s hitting being easier when a new MLB The Show game is released or shooting being easier when a new NBA 2K game drops, it’s a trend that can’t help but be particularly annoying to those who play these annual releases every year. By now it’s clear that patches early in the game’s cycle will eventually ramp up the difficulty, but the first month or two of sports games is typically now a period where it’s accepted that any skill gap will be less apparent.

That’s why defense is so hard to play early on in Madden 25 and offenses are capable of going up and down the field with little resistance. As per usual, it’s zone coverages that are especially vulnerable on any given play. Even the best of defenders aren’t able to properly patrol their assigned zones, creating separation for receivers. Man coverage fares somewhat better at least, though it’s hardly a foolproof alternative to the zone coverages you’re trying to avoid.

The new addition of a defensive switch stick that allows you to quickly control another player in your secondary is appreciated. It’s perhaps too early to tell whether this will be used all that frequently by the more casual Madden player, but there’s clearly the potential for the best players to develop a knack for knowing early in a play where the help of user input is needed before executing an efficient switch. It’s also great how you can easily disguise your defense while choosing your play by selecting what sort of shell you’d like to show the offense when emerging from the huddle.

Madden Ultimate Team

There isn’t all that much to be said about Madden Ultimate Team that wasn’t already expressed in my review of Madden 24 or, for that matter, over the last several years’ worth of Madden reviews.

The card-collecting mode squanders much of the inherent joy that comes with assembling a team of assorted NFL players from the past and present by all but requiring you to pay to win in its online modes. In order to obtain the best cards in packs or complete the top sets to upgrade your team, you’ll often find yourself being not so gently nudged towards using your credit card to invest in the currency of points. Should you want to try to compete against those with deep pockets as a no-money-spent player, then you best be prepared to accept the fact that you’ll be at a disadvantage with lesser cards than your opponent (unless you have a ton of free time to grind the mode).

You can stick with going against the CPU in interchangeable challenges or over the course of solo battles and Seasons, but the rewards this year for doing that seem to be even worse than in the past. The mode’s in dire need of at least one balanced head-to-head draft event permanently available to play like Battle Royale in MLB The Show‘s Diamond Dynasty where you can be certain that your team’s rating is roughly the same as your opponent. The absence of such an option is made all the more confounding and frustrating when you consider the fact that this used to be part of Madden Ultimate Team in the past.

Those who like to play Squads within MUT should be excited by the opportunity to now play 6-on-6 with and against others online, inching closer to a full 11-on-11 squads mode. As it is though, the uninitiated are likely to find all of the intricacies of MUT confusing, overwhelming, and exceedingly predatory.

Bottom Line

Madden 25 continues to see the series make subtle but impactful changes to how the game unfolds between the whistles. The adjustments on the offensive side of the ball are particularly noticeable, producing the capability to find and then move through open space better in the running game and sling the ball into tight spots when executing optimally through the air. Refined physics can be felt on every play, causing the ensuing animations of players moving and eventually bashing into each other to occur with increased realism.

The career Superstar mode still needs some work to refine its imperfections, but it has renewed potential through tangible goals and a handy interface that lets you switch between an assortment of single-player and multiplayer options.

The series still can’t quite capture what most people want from a franchise mode though, introducing an abundance of new storylines that fail to captivate and continuing to rely on a tired framework that recent tweaks can only do so much to disguise. Trying to play defense is incredibly tricky at launch, though this is somewhat by design in wanting to simplify offense for newbies and will likely be rectified by future patches. Madden Ultimate Team continues to be a lucrative cash grab for EA that’s constructed in such a way to part you with your money and doesn’t reward you nearly enough for investing your time instead.