Madden 12 Review: Why It’s The Best and Worst We’ve Ever Played

Because really big games deserve really long walls of text.

It’s almost football season, and that can only mean one thing — it’s time to wrap our hands and minds around the latest copy of Madden NFL. We originally planned this out to be a dual review to give you guys a greater perspective, unfortunately the hurricane on the east coast has put my co-author out of commission. I assure you however, that I’ve played enough Madden 12 for the both of us, so sit back and relax (or panic, if that’s your thing) and get a sneak peek inside GoMadden’s views on Madden NFL 12, and why we think it’s by far both the best and worst Madden we’ve ever played.

Gameplay Has Never Been Better

“…I have to say there’s no question this is the best football game I’ve ever played in terms of gameplay.”

For the second straight year, EA Sports has downplayed the gameplay enhancements they’ve made in Madden. Last season, the flagship additions were marketed as Gameflow and Online Team Play, and this year Franchise has gone front and center as the reason-to-buy. I think EA has been doing themselves a disservice, because both this season and last, I think gameplay has grown leaps and bounds with not nearly the acclaim it should be receiving.

In Madden 12, a brand-new collision system and consecutive hit tackling completely changes the way the game feels, and it’s never felt better. I guess because you have to actually play the game to understand, I can see why EA has been so modest about its mechanical improvements from an advertising perspective, but they’re certainly impressive. As someone who spends all year round writing about Madden, playing Madden and teaching others how to play Madden, I have to say there’s no question this is the best football game I’ve ever played in terms of gameplay.

In the past, it wouldn’t be difficult to frustrate me whenever a receiver dropped a pass after getting hit — for whatever reason it just didn’t feel fair. This year, there are more passes dropped as the result of collisions than ever, and yet, I couldn’t be happier about it. The way the game flows just feels right, it actually feels like you shouldn’t have caught that pass sometimes, and on defense there’s a great deal of enjoyment in knowing you can actually separate receivers from the ball if your timing is good.

Defense, too is something that received a significant overhaul. The zone coverage in Madden 12 is impressively good, which says a lot considering one of the primary gameplay complaints from Madden 11 was that it’s too easy to pass and score. Now, zone defenders will not only get proper depth in their responsibilities, but they will even float over to defend against nearby receivers if they don’t have an immediate threat, as opposed to just sitting two feet away while a receiver stands wide open on a curl for an hour.

I briefly mentioned consecutive hit tackling earlier, but I think I should clarify its significance. In past Madden seasons, there has always been something notoriously known as Tumbleweed tackles, which crippled gameplay. For a long time, only one defender could truly tackle a player, which caused situations where sometimes an entire team of defenders would whiff on a tackle if the offensive player was already in a struggle with just one defender. This has been a gameplay concern for a long time, and could very often decide outcomes of games. Without a doubt, it was also the cause of many huge offensive plays in Madden 11. Now, the days of the tumbleweed are almost entirely gone, as more than one defender can hit the ball carrier, making defense prominent once again after a short hiatus.

A Franchise With A Dangerously Bad Scouting Department

“…As a core concept different scouting events are great, but as executed it feels cheap, tedious and without any real intelligent way to track, mark favorites or keep notes on scouted players inside the game, it quickly becomes bothersome.”

When Madden 11 was released, it received no updates to franchise mode, and we were told to be patient and expect a complete overhaul for the mode in the future. I was one of the many players who were more than willing to take a year off of franchise to give EA the time to get it right, as to me it’s by far the most enjoyable part of Madden every year (even with its problems). With so many changes made to franchise mode this season it’s hard to really get into all of them, but I think I’m being very fair (albeit contrarian compared to other reviews) when I say EA dropped the ball with franchise mode.

I’ve seen some early reviews praising franchise mode endlessly, and as much as I want to agree, I can’t imagine what they were thinking when they didn’t apply enough significance to some pressing problems. For franchise to work, I’ve always said it has to be all about the draft, all about scouting and developing talent. In my opinion, after several playthroughs, this is the area EA fell short in, and it’s absolutely crippling to the mode. Ostensibly, this wouldn’t seem like the case, as there’s now several events to scout players for, more strategy involved in making roster cuts and dynamic player performance to keep you busy. Unfortunately, that’s just the outside, and there’s much to be desired once you go in.

On the inside, scouting is really just the same thing lethargically repeated several times over, with a splash screen and number of players allowed to scout being the only thing that really differentiates the scouting events. As a core concept different scouting events are great, but as executed it feels cheap, tedious and without any real intelligent way to track and keep notes on scouted players inside the game, it quickly becomes bothersome. Please, I beg you EA, give us a form of Scouting 2.0, because I don’t think scouting is really getting the emphasis it deserves in franchise these days.

It’s not just that the current scouting system seems unfulfilling, it’s that we’ve actually gone backward and lost key elements of scouting from the past. No longer can you see important details about a player like his 40 time, bench press, long jump or cone drill. The very smart and useful bubble-graph to see the skillset of a player is also gone. The big problem with the loss of these two features, is that since player names are randomized to prospects, you now have absolutely no way to make an intelligent draft selection of anyone you didn’t personally select to have scouted.

This is nothing like the NFL, even though at first thought it sounds like it.

Sure, if you send out scouts to watch a player personally you should have more information about them, but it shouldn’t completely shut you out from players you don’t scout. In the NFL, coaches still have season statistics to go by, physical trials recorded by outlets other than themselves and plenty of ways to make smart decisions on players that they may not have been able to watch themselves (BLESTO scouting comes to mind). The problem this creates in the game world is obvious: Because you’re only allowed to scout so many players, and because many of those players you scout will be gone relatively quickly, you’re often left with the majority of your draft looking at names, height and weight… and that’s what you’re expected to go by.

At first you would think this is just a strategical challenge, and that you should try to spread your scouts out to only a few players in each round, so that you’ll have reports to match players in every round and not be left so much in the dark. This still isn’t a good solution however, since there are 32 picks in each round, and at best with this strategy you could scout only a handful projected players for each round and get an effective report on even fewer. Are you telling me NFL teams only scout six or seven players projected for the first round? I can’t do much more than that, or else I’m in the dark for the rest of the draft. And when I say in the dark, I mean I have absolutely no information about the other players, which means when I hit on someone I feel lucky and unfulfilled since there was no skill or significant decision making involved, and when I miss on someone I feel cheated by the system.

The franchise scouting system could be very good if they simply brought back the bubble-graph that makes the drafting experience more enjoyable, as well as basic trial numbers such as 40 yard dash. These things have never given away precise ratings of players, and sometimes were even wrong, so they were never negative aspects of franchise. Until this is resolved, it’s really not worth getting into all what else is good about franchise, because without the draft there’s little reason to play it. It’s a shame, really, because there’s a lot to like in the rest of the mode, such as dynamic player performance, future draft pick trading and other important changes.

This current scouting system is such a problem, that I’ve actually found online franchise to be more enjoyable, which is saying a lot considering online franchise has hardly been touched since its inception (and you must wait 30 minutes for each week to advance). In online franchise you are shown the full ratings for rookies during the draft (and oddly enough, it still has the bubble-graph) but I actually believe it takes more drafting skill and is a more fulfilling experience than the crapshoot that EA has set up for the offline mode this year.

There’s also what appears to me to be a crtical bug in the supersim mode within franchise. I’m past the point in my Madden career where playing the actual team in my franchise is fun, since I could win any game with just about any team. Instead, for veterans like me it’s all about drafting and developing talent, and then simming the season to see my progress. The most enjoyable way to do this is to start up the game for that week, and watch the play-by-play in supersim. For whatever reason however, simming outside the game and supersimming within the game are entirely different. When I sim inside the game — and this has been tested adnauseum for accuracy — the running game seems to be almost entirely predicated on dice rolls of break tackle abilities. That is to say, if you have an awful running back with very high elusiveness and feed him the ball 20 times a game, he’s guaranteed to have nearly 200 yards or even more because the game seems to just gauge his chances of breaking a tackle and scoring.

At first this might sound kind of fun, but then the reality sets in that the same thing happens for the computer, and huge running plays for touchdowns become all too common. As a side effect, this also means that your defense won’t have a whole lot of tackles, since a ton of running plays will go all the way for a touchdown. I’ve supersimmed every game in a season in franchise mode from within the game a few times now, and the result was often that my leading tackler had 30-40 tackles. I don’t think I have to explain how badly this impacts the progression of defensive rookies if given enough time.

It’s not just the tackling/elusiveness part of supersim that seems broken, either. Injuries are also drastically more prevalent in a season of full supersims at 10 minute quarters. I’m almost positive at this point that at least within supersim, injury ratings are not relative to the time. In a perfect world, a 95 injury rating with 10 minute quarters would produce the same amount of injuries as a 95 injury rating in 5 minute quarters, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in supersim, and it’s absolutely crippling.

And yet, amidst all the turmoil in the scouting, drafting and simming process there is a genuinely good new way to take part in Free Agency. Whereas before free agency had a lackluster feel of throwing money at someone, this season there’s an actual bidding system that is both fun, and challenging. I do wish we had a list of free agents in advance to make preparation a more important part, and it would be nice if there was more of a visual cue for players you are currently bidding on, but it’s still a great step forward that is worth mentioning, and even worth looking forward to every offseason.

Overall, franchise makes me feel as if testers never even touched supersim, and feedback groups never even brought up the problem with the scouting system. Luckily, everything mentioned seems very fixable in a title update, so my fingers are crossed that I’ll be able to enjoy a very good franchise mode this year, as I had been looking forward to all offseason.

An Online Arena For Today’s Social Scene

“…One of my favorite parts of MUT this year is the addition of Legendary Packs, which add in a level of uncertainty that is so important in card pack buying.”

In today’s world, staying connected with others you know is a critical part of online activity, and Madden NFL 12 manages to accomodate that fact beautifully. With the all-new Online Communities, players can create or join communities that play the way you want to play the game, complete with local leaderboards and customized settings. That means you can join a community with all your forum buddies and play and win games in an environment that actually matters to you. As a side effect, communities also encourage people to quit and cheat in games less, since there’s the inherent feeling of accountability. I do wish you could have private communities that worked by invites instead of just passwords, however that’s just me.

A year ago we wrote in our Madden 11 review that the online mode was hampered early on by a lack of foresight in balancing that caused players to leave games before half time and never receive a loss. This made the game nearly unplayable online, and in my case I went through 20 games in a row before someone stayed the whole game, and in true rage fashion, I lost from a field goal, leaving me 0-1 as opposed to 20-1. Ouch.

Now, if you leave a game at any point you receive a loss, and your opponent receives a win. EA rightfully had some concerns that this would encourage people to find and expoit glitches that cause their opponents to drop out of the game, however I think that’s a lot less exploitable than someone merely leaving when they’re losing, so to me it’s the right choice.

Even Madden Ultimate Team (the online card game) is connecting players together better. Now, if you have a card your friend wants you can work a trade with them so you both end up happy. Don’t have a friend to trade with? That’s not a problem either, because now there’s a trade block you can place cards on, and even let people know in advance the type of value you are looking for in return. Although currently cards can only be traded one-for-one, the talk from the team on Twitter has been that there may be a possibility of adding more flexibility to trades in the future. For now, trading of any sort is good enough for me, and it makes the mode feel more at home in the card collecting universe.

One of my favorite parts of MUT this year is the addition of Legendary Packs, which add in a level of uncertainty that is so important in card pack buying. With Legendary Packs, players will receive a healthy mix of players from the previous tiered card pack, however there is also a chance of getting a Legendary player card in the process. The odds of getting one of those players seems to be in favor of the house, however it’s enough of a chance that you’ll want to keep trying in hopes of getting your very own Jerry Rice, Dan Marino or many other cards of historic players.

If I had any real complaints about online play — and this might be griping a bit — it would be that quick matches in normal games are just a bit slower now since it takes time to not only check if you need a roster update, but also if you need a tuner update (tuners being EA’s way to make improvements to the game a lot quicker than before). Considering the significance of the tuner system, we’re willing to deal with this.

Speaking of quick matches, there are two unheralded adjustments EA made to its match making system that really shine. The first is a distinction made between skill and level. Players now gain levels and skill separately when they play, making for a much better matchmaking system. The second is the removal of a player’s win/loss record from the matchmaking screen. While some may not like this kind of information removed, to me it’s a huge improvement to the system, because as someone who usually boasts a quality record I would often find myself in the “quick match” screen for several minutes, as I watch people join and dodge over and over again. This also means there are a lot less players out there climbing up the leaderboards by hand-picking opponents in the quickmatch screen.

Despite Franchise Woes, It’s Worth Every Penny

“…if you just want to enjoy the best-playing football game ever made, then you absolutely cannot go wrong with Madden NFL 12″

Despite the serious concerns we have about scouting and the draft in franchise mode, this is still the best Madden we’ve ever played. The tackles in the game are beautiful, the gameplay is stellar and fans will get a great kick out of the online communities feature. If you were hoping to buy Madden just for its improved franchise mode, then we would recommend holding off until it’s more clear what changes might be made in a title update, but if you just want to enjoy the best-playing football game ever made, then you absolutely cannot go wrong with Madden NFL 12, and will spend a great deal of time just checking out all the improvements made on and off the field.

We don’t give out stars or letter grades around here, but suffice it to say we’re excited to finish this review, and get right back into the game.