Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Rip-off"

Once again, EA Sports let me down!! I should be used to this by now but i guess I'm just a sucker! Of course they really don't care about their most loyal fans, only about making a quick buck. I have been playing the franchise mode for the last 10 years and was really excited to see them fix the few remaining issues since the overhaul last year. So you can imagine my horror when i put the game in and tried to get right into the franchise mode and couldn't even find the dang thing. Took my awhile but after doing an online search i realized it was now the connected careers mode. What idiot thought of that idea! Oh, lets take something that for the last 10 years has been a staple of the game and rename it and make it unplayable!! That should really frustrate those stupid franchise gamers who are always whining to us about all those costly "improvements"! Maybe now they will all go away and never bother us again. That is the only scenario i can think of for this debacle. It was almost perfect last year aside from a few minor bugs. The scouting and progression systems were finally fixed. The menus were good. The game moved along quickly. Now....it is not even playable!

So now let me get into the meat of the PROBLEMS. First off that ONE stupid menu song makes me want to jab a sharp instrument into my head after hearing it for 8 hours. I always enjoyed setting my song menu with all the power and glory songs in the past and finding a few new artists i liked. Now you get one horrible song. I had to turn off the sound and put on my power and glory CD. Must have gotten tired of paying all those artists for their music!

The menu system is the worst ever. Financial management is crucial to building a winning franchise but it's almost impossible to manage in this game. In the past all the salary info was included in the main player info screen and you could easily cut or resign from one menu. Now you have go to another menu all together to find the salary info. But once your there you can't resign or cut from that menu. So stupid. Obviously the developers have never tried playing a franchise themselves or they would realize this makes the game almost unplayable. Now you can only resign a player during their walk year.

Where did the potential rating go? That was such a great improvement last year and now it's gone after one year. Now there is a size rating which is so out of whack it's a joke. I'm a Seahawks fan so i only got a chance to look at our personnel but from what i saw it was whack. I think Red Bryant, our huge DE who is really a DT at 330lbs was rated in the 30s for size. Just shotty work really. And if you want to play a guard at tackle or DT at DE forget about it. For some reason you can only play a C at T but not a guard. Ya, that makes a lot of sense! It's just the little things like this, and there are so many more but I'm tired of writing about them. In fact I'm done with Madden for good after this experience. At least I didn't actually buy it this year. I just rented it for a few days from GameFly. So sad, but your dead to me now Madden!