Format: Xbox One
Genre: Sports
Developer: Electronic Arts
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Madden NFL 15 features some wonderful player animations, great texture resolution, extremely polished user interface, and even some nice FMV overlays introducing the starting quarterbacks each game. On the flip-side, the game is very over-the-top in terms of pizazz, with in-your-face presentation, and the almost constant instant replay transition animation is nausea inducing.

There's nothing particularly special about the aural presentation in Madden NFL 15; the various music tracks fit the "heroic" theming that has always characterized the NFL for whatever reasons, but mostly just blend into the background. The commentary isn't overtly bad but is generally unremarkable. The stadia do play the various team sounds, such as the "Skol Vikings" song when Minnesota scores, which is a nice touch.

Unlike Madden games of yore, the players are actually somewhat responsive in this title, lending more of an "in control" feeling than in years past. The franchise mode has most of the features one would expect, although the user interface is needlessly complicated. And there is a collectible card game mode to provide an alternative to the traditional ways of playing.

Madden NFL 15's core gameplay engine is wonderful, but everything around it is rather obnoxious; the "in your face" camera angles and replay transitions really get tiresome quickly. The menus are pretty but annoyingly sluggish, with simple inputs often registering two and even three times, instead of just once. The "crowd-sourced" play calling interface is indecipherable-- what happened to just picking a formation and a play?-- and there are about four hundred menus scattered all throughout the game, making finding a single item exhausting-- "where did I see that option again??" Madden NFL 15 isn't a bad game, but its design is "too clever by half", and the experience really suffers for it.