Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Been there, done that"

I'm not a big football buff, so forgive me if I'm not technical enough. I just play sports games for fun, as "pick me ups". Madden 13 was not bad. The last Madden I played before this one was Madden 11. I definitely noticed some differences, specifically with the physics enginge and the AI. Sometimes the physics was really great and realistic, sometimes it was just clumsy and unrealistic. In terms of AI, I don't remember being "picked" this much in the last one; it really forced me to think about my plays, which I liked.However, I still felt that the players sometimes lacked common sense or didn't make tackles when they should have. One thing I DEFINITELY didn't like was the lagginess, which really shouldn't be acceptable. I mean Madden is a huge franchise that rakes in tons of dough, what's with that? Also, going through the menus was a drag. Why did they have to make things so complicated?

As for other features in the game, I tried to find season mode and couldn't find it, which was weird. I also thought there used to be mini-games? Or what about practice mode (I did find that, but it was weird and overly complicated). I never really played the franchise modes so I can't tell you that much about that. But I will say that it looks like the game took out features for no real reason, and made design choices that were worse than previous installments. Overall, Madden has gotten into the habit of just tweaking their games, which stinks. When will they actually have an upgrade for once?