Frandawg95

A surprisingly not awful entry by a developer who simply could not care about innovating or producing high quality games anymore. This is not perfect by any means, and the glaring problems that exist with Madden around consistency, repetitiveness and bugs generally exist here. But it provides some smidge of hope that they do have teams within EA who at least give a damn. If they got one thing right, it was capturing the essence of college football and the diversity around the country. It is quite impressive to see so many unique entrances and stadiums. The gameplay is also generally quite fun. I hope (perhaps naively) that they don't just keep this base and make minute improvements year on year and continue to churn out the same garbage. It would be nice to see them use this as a base to genuinely build a special franchise. God knows EA is overdue for it.

A slightly more favourable version compared to last years entry, but that is no compliment. We are seeing in real-life terms the effects of any company having a monopoly over an industry and it isn't great. 0 innovation, 0 creativity, 0 ambition to honour the passion and culture of football and its diversity around the world. The very fact that I'm happy they brought back pre-game presentation cut scenes tells you all you need to know about how far this franchise has fallen. I fear until we get a new competitor on the market, and hopefully 2k and FIFA can do something meaningful and obtain enough licenses to rival EA, then we will continue to get more and more of this garbage.

A beautiful enhancement of one of the best games ever made. It was a pleasure to relive this experience with the same graphical fidelity as pt.2. My only gripe was that they didn't extend this "re-make" to aligning the gameplay with that of pt.2 as well. I understand it would've taken some level re-design to do it, but that's what I thought a remaster was all about?

Given that this is EA Sports first release without the FIFA tag, part of me had hoped that it was EA's opportunity to really pack in new features, refine game modes, and significantly increase content in order to make it seem as though the only thing holding them back in the last few years of producing mediocre football games was the overreaching nature of FIFA. Unfortunately, this is just as much a "next entry" as any typical year of FIFA would have been. The game play sees certain refinements with the adoption of the new gaming engine. This isn't a bad thing, as gameplay triggers seem slightly less obviously animation based than they were before. The presentation, however, has to be the worst presentation perhaps to ever come out of an EA football game. They've made a return to an old fashioned menu screen, which is clunky and impractical. The reason for this? Who knows. It makes no practical sense, as if there was one thing you could commend EA on, was its menu's being entirely clean and functional. Most importantly, the matchday presentation has been side swiped in a way that could make a grown man cry... No pre-match presentation, no team walkouts, no team songs, no pre-game lineups, no champions league anthems... Whoever made this creative decision must genuinely have a vendetta against EA, or just simply hates the people who buy these games. Where's the quality control? How in the world did this get past any kind of testing... Overall, another depressingly average entry in a series that has been void of any meaningful innovation or effort for over a decade now.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]