It’s American Football season again as pre-season games are under way. Along with that comes EA’s yearly installment of its football franchise, Madden. We are currently up to Madden 19 and something fairly special has happened this year. If you haven’t guessed yet Madden has returned to PC for the first time in 10 years. The last Madden we PC players received was Madden 08. What a long ten years it has been. A question for many though is, was the wait worth it? Do we as PC gamers receive the best Madden experience to date, and how has the game evolved in ten years. Let’s find out!
Game modes
Let’s start with game modes because to be frank there have been some additions to what some of may be accustomed to. Franchise mode returns along with head to head games vs. online opponents. Practice mode and create a player is also there. Skill trainer where you can practice specific skills and it has specific scenarios setup for you to work on game mechanics. New modes include Longshot which is a story driven Football experience that continues the story from Madden 18. The big “newest” mode is Madden Ultimate Team or MUT for short. This combines virtual card collecting with fantasy football allowing you to create a team to play online against others with players from many different eras and teams. My ultimate team has Dan Marino on it and it’s quite a cool thing to be able to play with legends of the game.
Madden Ultimate Team is where most players are going to spend the majority of their time in Madden 19. It’s where EA spends most of its resources each year and sees the most improvements. It’s also where EA makes the majority of its money from. It’s an interesting mode and I know a few people that are enjoying it but for me it felt like a grind coated with shinny pack openings.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time with MUT and I have to say it’s a flawed mode in practice. It involves a lot of repetitive and similar tasks with defeating X or Y team with a specific amount of time left on the clock. The starting challenges are overly easy and give you a false sense of the gameplay experience if you take your MUT team online before you have a maxed out team.
Graphics
The graphics of Madden 19 are quite impressive to take in. The level of detail in player models and stadiums is quite breathtaking. I expect nothing less from the Frostbite engine at this point and would be disappointed if it did not look and sound fantastic. I really have nothing negative against the models and the graphical quality of the game.
Where I do have some issues is the performance and frame rate issues with the game. I have a decent enough setup and I have issues during cut scenes of stadiums and in-between plays.
Sound
The sounds of the game are both high quality and good, but there are issues with the on field commentary being repetitive. The sounds of the players tackling each other are crisp they also not varied much and mostly all sound the same. I understand that overall these sounds are going to sound similar but I feel like there are only a few sounds and they don’t change much on the type of hit or strength of the hit. However my biggest sound issue is the repetitive commentary and the lack excitement when a big play happens. I personally turned off the in game commentary within two hours of playing because it all sounded like the same thing from 18 and wasn’t interesting to keep on much longer then that. There is also no way to mute your opponent online, causing for some extremely frustrating experience listening to random breathing, dogs barking and other noises that are playing through their microphone without any way to mute them on your end.
Animations and Gameplay
Now normally I would just speak about the gameplay for a game, but with the new Real Player Motion that was added this year to Madden 19 the animation system plays directly into the gameplay. The gameplay is over all similar to all previous Madden games as your goal is to play a game a football and control players on the field in an attempt to win the game, simple at the end of the day.
Now with the addition of Real Player Motion it directly affects the animations we see in the game and these animations directly affect the result of the game. You might think to yourself that is great because you want to the new additions to affect the game and give you a more realistic football experience. Unfortunately that just isn’t the case. These new systems create some funny and interesting video clips, but over all create an inconsistent and frustrating football game. I realize that football can be a complex game and I may not master it in two weeks but I feel I should at least be getting consistent results in game. I have a video clip I can’t use to quality that shows a receiver catching a ball and not being touched by anyone and the play being whistled dead. It’s abysmal the amount of silly unrealistic and frankly game running experience you encounter due to the animations and gameplay. It takes away from the experience and it tarnishes Madden’s return to PC in a way I am not sure will be able to be fixed with patches this year.
Here is a compilation of clips of just things not behaving as one would expect from a game in terms of user responsiveness.
Disclosure: We are not currently sponsored or endorsed by Plays.tv, I just used their software to record clips for the purpose of this review and showing them in a concise manor.
The Endzone
This is the first time we have had a Madden game on PC in ten years and while that in itself is something to get excited about, the overall experience isn’t what you would expect after waiting so long. There are issues left and right with this title, from performance issues in game along with issues with specific OS versions (windows 7) and gameplay issues. There is a focus on MUT team that leaves little reason to play other modes online as it has a higher player base revolving around the microtransaction centric mode. There has been one major patch since the game released and while it made quite a few game play changes and “fixed” some issues, my biggest issue with being able to mute in game VOIP isn’t yet possible and may never be I also have a tone of input lag online that doesn’t exist when playing offline. If you’re interested in picking up the game and trying it, I’d try it through Origin access as that way if it’s not what you’re expecting you aren’t out a ton of money. I only hope that this game gets patched to a more playable and PC friendly state before next year as I would hate to see issues with Madden 19 be “fixed” with Madden 20. It’s football on PC after 10 years but at what cost. That’s up to you as an individual to determine if this is what you have been waiting for. For me, it wasn’t.
