Genre: Sports
Developer: EA Orlando
Publisher: Electronic Arts

This latest Madden's presentation is a little flat. It has lots of flashy transition effects, and it's cool how the main menu system has game footage FMV playing behind it. But there isn't much of a half-time show, no cheerleaders, no coin toss, the menus are spartan, and many other visual aspects feel similarly bare-boned. On the flip-side, the in-game engine has never looked nicer: the resolution is super sharp, sweat beads on the players' arms, and many of the stadia settings are aesthetically pleasing with nice saturated colors and very good texture plus materials work.

The usual selection of rap music, with occasionally muted-out naughty words, are all present during the menus. The songs play during the franchise mode's various cut-scenes to sometimes hilarious effect, with the lawn sprinkler and weird horn note progressions feeling contextually inappropriate. The in-game commentary has three selectable crews, and Kate Scott's voice makes this reviewer's ears bleed: she even says "bruh" in one of her lines. The other two crews are passable, but a long way from the amazing fictitious announcers in the NFL 2Kx titles. The crowd noises sound decent, with reasonable volume and believability.

Almost every Madden has some kind of major gameplay issue, whether it's dropped passes one year, hyper-hawking DBs the next year, or a busted running game the following season. This time however the game plays just about right! Slants are perhaps a little too difficult this time around, and sometimes the AI quarterbacks-- even backups!-- go into a "rampage" perfection mode. But otherwise the matches have a nice flow to them, and of course there is the usual slate of sliders to customize the difficulty to the player's liking.

This is fundamentally the same Madden this reviewer was playing back in 2017 on the PlayStation 4 Pro: the franchise mode is almost identical, and even though there have been years of minor refinements to the animation and gameplay systems, there has not been any kind of radical reinvention or improvement to the specifics. All of that said, this is the best looking and best playing Madden in the modern era, with a fun selection of modes and rock solid gameplay.