When it comes down to it, I'd rather have 10 things to do every turn, rather than 10,000. When I think about how hairy and antisocial hardcore baseball sims like Out of the Park can get, it makes me appreciate how Madden understands its audience enough to scale things back. The format itself is also simpler from what I remember in previous Maddens you can highlight a few players to develop each week, you can scout an offensive and defensive scheme to counter whoever you're playing on Sunday, and the depth chart is remarkably easy to alter. It's a particularly fun year to mess around with the sim, given all the intriguing new quarterbacks entering the league (for the first time in a while, it's actually kinda fun to rebuild the Browns). Tiburon's reliable Franchise Mode returns once again, for all of your amateur General Management fantasies. It's nice, it's fun, and it's also kinda weird that it's getting back-of-the-box real estate. Now, when you score, you're given the option to perform any number of viral dances to punk the opposing squad. It's illuminating that one of the flashpoint additions this year is the reintroduction of touchdown celebrations, which the NFL decriminalized last year. I am glad that they are chipping away at those things, but this is still not the urtext of football, nor will it ever be. However, to be clear, this is the same promise EA puts forth every season-I've lost count of the number of times Tiburon has tried to sell their NFL game by claiming that they've finally solved the uncanny valley issues that's always dogged its engine. If all you're looking for is some exhibition matches with the boys, consider that a ringing endorsement. As always the higher strategies of football academia is put on the backburner you can easily make due by calling the plays the game suggests, paying no attention to the geometry of a Cover 2. The players also seem to cut and change direction in a twitchier, more sensitive way, which took me some time to internalize. The hitchiness on the line of scrimmage is replaced with a smoother sense of chaos, with tackles dovetailing into gang tackles and back into broken tackles. The game looks good and it ran well on my laptop, I'll give 'em that. A considerable amount of emphasis is put on "real player motion"-a fancy way of saying the models are better animated-which EA claims better replicates the product on TV.
However, the window dressing this time out seems particularly sparse. It's a particularly fun year to mess around with the sim, given all the intriguing new quarterbacks entering the league.Īs is customary, Madden 19 is stockpiled with a highly marketable list of new content, which is primed specifically for that midway point during EA's E3 press conference every year. For more on all that, head to our performance impressions. We're a little disappointed that Madden 19 doesn't have remappable controls, but aside from that, we've found that it runs well, and there are lots of graphics and gameplay options.