Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

As an experienced Madden gamer, I've reviewed the last four or five iterations of this franchise (pretty much all the 360/PS3 versions) and been alternately hopeful and disappointed with this generation's Madden games. Some years, the series appears to take a leap forward, as was the case in 2011-2012, when some minor changes improved the performance of big, strong receivers and made for a more balanced game. Other editions, however -- most recently Madden 12 -- were huge disappointments, with almost no improvements to previous editions; or, worse, changes that actually made the game inferior.

I'm happy to report that, on the whole, Madden NFL 13 is one of the "good" years in the series' history. Frankly, I'm surprised that the bulk of user reviews here have been so negative. In this review, I'll detail some of the changes made to this edition (I'm assuming familiarity with previous versions of the game), and whether these changes work for better or worse.

CONNECTED CAREERS

The single biggest change to the way we play Madden is a new combination of Franchise and Superstar Modes. Basically, the entire concept has been reworked into a career mode where you act either as a head coach or an individual player. It's not merely a cosmetic change, either, as the new career mode delves deeper into certain aspects of the game. I'll touch on some negatives first.

For instance, as a coach, you must practice before each game to insure that you gain the maximum amount of experience points. Experience points then buy upgrades that allow you to become better at scouting, for instance, or that help you when it comes time to renegotiate contracts with your team's star players. The practice requirement is undoubtedly more realistic -- an actual NFL team spends all week in meetings or on the practice field preparing for Sunday's action. But is this really a good addition to the game? Ultimately, I found the practice requirement to be quite aggravating. To maximize your experience points, you have to play more or less a full game (that cannot be Supersimed) against your own defense. This means it takes twice as long to progress from week to week in franchise mode, and on balance that detracts from the experience.

Another serious negative worth mentioning is the deletion of certain features from previous franchise modes. It's always annoyed me how Madden seems to add three features and delete one each year, then reimplement that deleted feature and tout it as an "improvement" to the game. It's not an improvement to make your product crappier, then restore its original condition. This year, the two big features that were deleted are fantasy drafting and player editing. I'm not a fan of fantasy drafting and never used it in previous editions, so this isn't a big deal for me. If you loved doing a fantasy draft rather than starting with your own team's players, however, you may have to skip Madden 13 and wait for the inevitable return of fantasy drafting next year.

The more crippling change is the removal of player editing. Believe it or not, developers, not everyone used editing to make all their players 100 overall. I, like many players, primarily used it to switch people's positions, which was extremely useful. In real-life, players switch positions all the time. This happens most frequently on the offensive line, where people get shuffled around to form the best starting five. But it also happens in the secondary (see Charles Woodson's move to safety this season), at linebacker (Mario Williams moving from 4-3 end to 3-4 outside backer, then moving back to 4-3 end), and on the defensive line. Removing this feature is a huge hindrance to how we play, and was a completely needless deletion.

Another puzzling deletion is player-controlled trades during the NFL draft. Rather than being able to offer up different packages to move down, you now select the option "Trade Down" and then select from four or five prepackaged deals. The prepackaged deals are actually pretty favorable to the human player (to move down two or three spots in the early first round, you often get a team's second-round pick and next year's first), but I still would prefer more freedom there.

There are two major changes that are tremendous positives, however, and that taken together make me a big fan of this revised franchise mode.

First, Madden has replaced the potential system of player growth and development. Bravo, guys, it was about time. It was ridiculous that you could have an 82 OVR running back regularly putting up 1,400 yard, 12 TD seasons, but because he had "maxed out" his potential his rating did not change. Meanwhile, if a guy puts up a single 1,400 yard, 12 TD season in real life, the Madden developers bump his rating in the next game by 5-8 points (see what happened to Fred Jackson after last season).

The new system is based on experience points, just like your coach development. You get points for meeting goals and putting up important statistics for your position. Then, you apply those to improve the attributes you desire, which is great. If you want your halfback to becoming a better pass catcher, you can devote all his experience points to route running, catching in traffic, and catching.

This system is imperfect but overall it's a paradigm shift that's long overdue. The major tweak I would suggest is that there have to be more experience points available. Right now, even with great statistical seasons, players rarely progress more than 3 points in overall rating. There should be more dramatic swings, and a truly great season should lead to a player gaining as many as 8-10 overall rating points. In particular, quarterbacks are extremely difficult to develop. I picked up a great rookie quarterback (started at 80 overall), but after three years he was rated 81! This despite three pretty decent seasons: my first two I had over 20 TDs, and my third I broke 30 TDs for the first time (and had better than a 2:1 TD:INT ratio). I'm not sure if the problem was that my run-heavy offense limited my passing yards (around 2,800-3,000 per season), but I'm pretty sure that in real life, a young quarterback who could throw for 3,000 yards and 30 TDs would be rated around 85 minimum.

The second major change that I'm loving is the new scouting system. Each week, you get a certain number of scouting points, and you spend them scouting specific attributes of the players you want. So if you're looking for a left guard, for instance, you can just scout pass and run blocking. If you don't like what you see, no need to waste more time on that guy.

This new system gives the player much more control over team-building, and for the first time in a long time, I felt both challenged by and entirely in control of the selection of players through the draft. In previous editions, scouting and drafting was either needlessly frustrating (not enough information given during scouting to make any rational judgment), or it was vulnerable to a cheap exploit that rendered it ridiculously easy (in Madden 12, for instance, the ability to sort players by potential meant that you knew every A-potential player available in the later rounds and could build a superstar team in only 2-3 years of drafting).

Having done a few drafts, I really love this new system, and it produces a mix of draft hits and draft busts just like in real life. For instance, through extensive scouting, I absolutely fell in love with a particular quarterback. I traded up to draft him No. 2 overall, and he ended up being a 78 overall rating with excellent arm strength, plenty of accuracy across the board, and strong play action abilities. As a late-round gem, I picked up a fifth-round cornerback who was rated 81 after one year of starting experience. On the other hand, I twice tried to draft a left defensive end (a serious need position) in the second or third round, but both times landed a serious, Vernon Gholston-level bust (neither guy rated above 68 overall).

I'm not the only team having trouble picking defensive ends, however. In the 4 drafts I've done, there have been only two or three ends who are rated over 80 after a few years -- and only one rated over 85. This strikes me as a bit ridiculous, since star ends come into the league every year with regularity. Since 2006, the league has added: Mario Williams, Tamba Hali, Lamar Woodley, Chris Long, Jason Pierre-Paul, and J.J. Watt. In other words, there is about one end every year who is good enough to be rated around 80 as a rookie and between 85 and 95 after a few seasons in the league. But almost no one of that quality is built into Madden's draft classes, which is puzzling given that there seems to be an ordinary amount of rookie players rated over 80 at other positions, particularly linebacker, cornerback, and receiver.

In short, the new scouting system is pretty close to ideal, this puzzling absence of defensive ends aside. If there's one thing I desperately hope that the series does not junk for next year, it's this new scouting system.

PRESENTATION

I usually don't spend too much time on presentation in my Madden reviews. Usually, this reflects the fact that the game looks more or less the same every year. While it looked great in 2009, quite frankly the game is looking a little uglier every year, and it's long since been surpassed by NBA 2K and FIFA for the title of best-looking sports game. (For that matter, Fight Night and a few others are also far better looking than Madden.)

This year, there have been positive additions, however, to other aspects of the presentation. The new commentary team is so much better than Chris Collinsworth that it's almost laughable. That's not a knock on Collinsworth's voice or his quirkly style, which I love, but in the previous Maddens his comments were terribly timed, often irrelevant, and just as often plain wrong (he often moaned about how a defensive back gave up a monster touchdown when in fact the DB had just gotten a pick-six). The in-game look has been revised to resemble a CBS television broadcast more closely, which is nice. And in Connected Career mode, the opening page is now a "news" site with major stories and a twitter feed of commentators (similar to the headlines in FIFA's career mode). This is a nice touch as well, and is actually quite useful. Some of the news stories published throughout a season will tout college prospects -- it was actually one such news story that first alerted me to the first-round quarterback I ultimately took as the cornerstone of my Browns franchise.

As always with Madden, though, the good comes mixed with something bad. This season, it's the new dynamic animation system. Highly touted as one of the headline features of this year's game, the Infinity Engine is actually a joke. It supposedly makes tackles more realistic by animating on the fly rather than using pre-canned motion renders. This is all well and good, but the rag-doll physics make hits laughably unrealistic, and players literally dive and trip over each other after plays are complete. Tackles look like a bizarre competition where the linebacker and running back see who can bounce in a more ridiculous fashion. It looks pretty terrible if you pay close attention to it, and honestly I much preferred the old animations to this clown show. I hope that EA improves on Infinity in coming years, because right now it's a negative, not a positive.

GAMEPLAY

Last, but not least, I'll add some notes about what I've noticed while playing the game. I'll try to update this final section the more I play and the more nuances I uncover, but for now I have this short list of key observations.

1) Lots of money routes or cheap tricks no longer work as well.

This is clearly a good thing. In Madden 12, I figured out a few key plays and routes that seemed to work against any defense. Just like that, the game became easy even on an amped-up version of All Madden, and I sold off my copy. Last year, for instance, there was too much press cover by corners who sucked at it. The easiest thing to do was draft receivers with 90+ release ratings and then just send them off on fly routes on every play. About 30-40 percent of the time, they would get pressed at the line, blow by the corner, and be open for a 20+ yard gain. Then, at the goal line, I would audible the same receiver to a fade route. It was almost unstoppable in Madden 12, as the receiver would get to the corner, leap up, and come down with the touchdown 60-70 percent of the time. That was wildly unrealistic (otherwise every team in the NFL would just run the fade three times in a row on the goal-line).

2) On the other hand, lots of "terrible" routes now work better.

In earlier Maddens, certain routes were impossible to hit. In particular, I found corner/flag routes very difficult, as the receiver was never open, or the corner too easily undercut the route for a pick. This year, these routes are getting open much more easily, particularly against zone coverages. If anything, the corner might be the new money route in the game, but it seems a little better balanced and doesn't work against all coverages.

3) Play action works! I repeat, play action works!

In Madden 10-12, I probably ran play action 0-1 times per game. That was because on higher difficulty settings, it took way too long to develop, and the entire defense was on your quarterback before you could even throw (you could even jam the button repeatedly, but he wouldn't throw until he finished getting out of his animation). This was especially true if they blitzed.

To their credit, the developers worked to address this issue, and this year a lot of play action routes seem to work splendidly, even against blitz defenses. Again, I haven't played long enough to be able to tell whether or not play action plays are now overpowered money plays, but so far I like being able to use a tactic that every team in the NFL reguarly deploys on Sundays.

4) No more BS interceptions by players who didn't even look at the ball.

This is huge. Everyone who's played Madden has experienced the frustration. A linebacker or corner has his head turned and you want to fire a pass to a receiver who is just gliding by that defender. When the ball gets there, however, the corner just leaps into the air and plucks the ball in a basket catch, Willie Mays-style, without even having glanced back once.

Well, one of the big promises for Madden 13 was that this kind of psychic interception would not happen again. And, to the game's credit, I haven't seen it. You can now throw more confidently across the middle when you've flummoxed the linebackers (they don't have the freakish ability to knock the ball down while running with their back turned in the opposite direction from your throwing trajectory).

5) On the default settings, defense is way too easy.

I started cutting my teeth on All Madden as soon as I picked up this game. I struggled (and am still struggling) on offense as I readjust to the changes in the passing game. I was scoring 7-17 points per game (admittedly, with the Browns, which might actually be realistic). However, even while running basic defensive concepts and pretty much just letting the CPU handle defense, I was only giving up 10-21 points per game. The fact that an incompetent person can pretty much have a ceiling of 21 points allowed is just silly. In real life, someone who ran Cover 2, Cover 3, and a few blitzes on 50 percent of plays would get torched for 40+ points. But it works in Madden NFL 13.

6) On the default settings, running is still a bit too hard.

Toggle the sliders on this one. As in previous Maddens, it's a struggle to maintain a 4 yard per carry average. This also means, as in previous Maddens, that offenses are radically unbalanced in favor of passing. In real life, the game is increasingly tilted toward passing, with plenty of 60-40 pass-rush attacks having tremendous success (the Peyton Manning era Colts, the Aaron Rodgers-led Packers, and of course Drew Brees' Saints and Tom Brady's Patriots are all recent examples). But the default 75-25 expectation of Madden is still a little unrealistic. If anything, running in Madden 13 has felt more difficult thus far than it did in 11 or 12. Even the CPU knows not to run and sticks to a 70-30 or 75-25 pass-run ratio.


7) There are some bizarre gameplay errors or rule errors that I haven't seen crop up in previous games. When you get close to the end of a half or the game and run out of bounds, the clock will stop (as it should). However, when you select a play, sometimes the clock will do its automatic run-down and then start ticking again, costing you something like 15 seconds. This is just not right! In football, when you run out of bounds, the clock stops, simple as that. It's so frustrating when you try to run a 2-minute drill, this error happens, and then you run out of time or have to spike the ball. Absolutely unacceptable for a football franchise that's been around for 25 years.

Another silly error occurs occasionally on punt returns. The AI returner will wave for a fair catch and your gunner will not tackle him. But then he will start running, gain a few yards, and the game gives the AI opponent those yards! This is also absurd and stems from some error where the game treats the catch as a fumble even though it's clearly a catch. (You can tell because the commentator says the same thing every time, some rambling comment about how "the ball just squirted out" or something.) Obviously when you call fair catch, fumble, and then recover, you can run. But that's not what's happening here. Hopefully the developers address these two bugs quickly and future patched versions will not have these niggling issues.


CONCLUSION

In the end, I've found that the improvements in Madden NFL 13 outweigh the negatives. The scouting and experience point systems for player drafting and development are meaningful, successful changes. The elimination of many offensive money plays, and the revival of play action's efficacy, are also great additions in my book. Overall, though, this is not the ideal Madden that we've all been waiting (10) years for. The developers have taken steps back in key areas, deleting fan-beloved features for seemingly little reason, and failing to fix some old issues with the running game that have plagued the series for many years.

Despite these deficiencies, Madden NFL 13 feels like a step in the right direction. More importantly, perhaps, it feels like a series that is now being helmed by ambitious rather than lazy developers. Indeed, the Madden team has a new director who demanded substantial changes to the series, and I'm looking forward to much more from him. The closest analogy I can think of is when a serious studio took over the FIFA series around FIFA 08 or 09. Even before the series became truly great, the big changes implemented in those years indicated the promise of what was to come. Hopefully, Madden NFL 13 will be the harbinger of much better football games to come.