The most memorable Minnesota Vikings game I ever attended was when I stood on the sideline and watched Daunte Culpepper dive in for the game-winning touchdown from 20 feet away; an exciting capper to an afternoon spent squinting up at the Metrodome’s tiny jumbotron trying to see what was happening. The Dome is long gone, but its spirit lives on in Madden NFL 22 – though not necessarily in the way EA intends. This year’s version seeks to capture the earsplitting crowd noise that was once the Metrodome’s calling card with new homefield mechanics, and it succeeds… sort of. But while it’s a functional way to experience football, it’s also charmless and frequently strange – the video game equivalent of navigating a concrete concourse under a dirty teflon roof.
After planting its flag last year with “Next-Gen Stats” – a system that uses on-field cameras to produce more refined if not always noticeable improvements to the animation – Madden NFL 22 takes the same slow and steady approach that has characterized the pace of improvements to the franchise over the past decade. Visually, it does not appear to be a large step up from the version of Madden 21 that ran on the PS4 Pro or Xbox One X, though it is noticeably smoother when running in the 60fps Performance Mode (or 120fps on Xbox Series X). It’s familiar enough that, after my first few hours with Madden NFL 22, my immediate reaction was to say, “Yep, it’s definitely Madden” – which is to say that the odd glitches, clunky interface, and slightly robotic animation continue to be very much in play.
This has been the Madden experience in a nutshell for many years now. It’s a grab bag of experiences and ideas, some of them decent, many of them undermined by poor execution and a lack of polish. It’s hard to pick any one area where this year’s version truly excels; almost every one of its best features is done better by one of its major competitors like 2K or Konami. Its biggest success over the past five years is probably the X-Factor system, an arcadey but fun way to differentiate certain superstars by granting them certain special abilities, which is likely the biggest reason that Madden NFL 22 is dredging up NCAA Football’s old homefield advantage mechanics and calling them “M-Factors.”
Homefield advantage is Madden NFL 22’s most notable new feature, impacting virtually every one of its modes in one way or another. It seeks to shake up the in-game atmosphere, which has been lackluster for years, and add an additional layer of strategy to boot. It’s not a bad idea on the face of it; yes, it’s a feature arguably being recycled from a series that’s almost a decade old now, and you can goof on the notion of homefield advantage when many teams in the NFL has long since priced out their most dogged fans, but the truth is that homefield advantage is still very much a factor in cities like Seattle and Green Bay – a factor that has never really been reflected in Madden. Frankly, I’ve been arguing that Madden should add homefield advantage for years now, so I’m glad to see it finally here.
As for whether it works… I’m not entirely sure yet. The idea is that a little momentum meter will tick up whenever a team makes a big play, unlocking perks like stamina boosts while potentially scrambling your opponent’s playart and causing the screen to shake. Away teams can even flip the script by silencing fans and unlocking perks of their own. It’s all fine in theory, but the momentum doesn’t quite ring true to me. In one game playing as the Browns, I unleashed a bomb to Odell Beckham, scoring a touchdown and taking the lead. A clear momentum swing, right? Cleveland’s fans would be going out of their mind. But the best I managed was to reset the momentum back to neutral.
It’s clear to me that there’s still some tinkering to be done with the balance of the M-Factors, and the development team seems to know it too – due to balance issues, only a handful of them are available in Madden Ultimate Team. The spotty execution is likewise in evidence in the remastered gameday audio, which will cut out whenever the camera cuts to an exterior stadium shot, and the new presentation, which is frankly… not good. Putting aside that it looks nothing like an actual TV broadcast, it tinges much of the graphics in a sickly shade of green, which for whatever reason I found very off-putting.
Other ways in which Madden almost comes together but doesn’t quite manage it are evident throughout. The interface is actually a step back this year, cramming together information in a mess of text and overlapping menus that somehow manage to be more confusing than ever. This, in turn, hampers its player avatar – a decent idea that feels more confusing than it should owing to how opaque even basic functions like character progression can be. Elsewhere, Madden NFL 22 has effectively thrown up an “under construction” sign, acknowledging that the much-needed scouting overhaul for career mode won’t be available until after launch.
Its most thoughtful updates tend to be the ones that pass unnoticed by fans. For instance, Madden NFL 22 introduces halftime adjustments, a small but significant new feature that has a notable impact on in-game strategy. If your opponent is burning you deep with Tyreek Hill, you can choose the “Defend Deep Pass” option at the expense of giving up shorter passes. Or if you’re in the lead, you can choose to focus on running the ball. Simple. I wish Madden’s features were always this straightforward.
This is where I reveal that I’m mainly a sim player, with the bulk of my playtime being devoted to my long-running online league – a sports genre rarity that I appreciate a little more with each passing year. Most Madden fans will tell you that Franchise mode has been disappointing over the past decade or so, with EA only relenting and committing to substantial updates to the modes after heavy backlash on social media. This is the first year that we get to see the fruits of EA’s labor, and the results are decent, if a bit mixed. Playing as the Buffalo Bills, I was pleased to see a short in-game cutscene acknowledging the magnitude of an upcoming playoff game with the New England Patriots. Such story moments have been sorely lacking from Madden’s franchise mode over the years, and they go a long way toward imbuing each season with a sense of narrative.
Still, Madden’s franchise mode has a ways to go before it catches up with the competition. Its version of the salary cap bears little resemblance to the real-life NFL, with no ability to restructure contracts or convert money into bonuses. Special teams are an afterthought – a shame, given that undrafted players who eventually develop into stars, such as Vikings receiver Adam Thielen, frequently come from the ranks of special teamers. And even the meaningful additions – like the ability to hire and fire coordinators who confer buffs to different parts of your team – have a brutalist feel to them thanks to the ramshackle nature of the interface.
I think at least some of my problems with the mode can be summed up in a recent conversation where I asked a producer why it wasn’t possible to include legends like Randy Moss in the fantasy draft, wondering if it was an NFLPA issue, and they admitted that it simply hadn’t been considered. This is a feature, I should mention, that has been in both NBA 2K and MLB The Show for years now. Madden’s franchise mode lacks that joyful sense of wish fulfillment that accompanies the best career modes, its rigidity betraying Madden’s overall lack of verve and creativity.
Whatever sense of joy Madden might have seems to be reserved for its resident arcade modes, which are, for the most part, a cut above the core simulation modes. Launching The Yard or Superstar KO is a bit like stepping into a different game entirely, with the stadiums, menus, and even the color palette shifting into a brighter, more hyperactive mood meant to elucidate the chaos of backyard football. These modes tie in much more firmly into the player avatar who sits front and center on the main menu screen, with progress in The Yard applying to Face of the Franchise, and vice versa.
It seems clear that Madden NFL 22 is trying to establish a centralized experience akin to its competitors, with progress in one mode unlocking global rewards like cosmetics in others. It’s not quite there yet, though, and much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the interface, which consistently hides its rewards behind one too many button presses. It doesn’t help that none of the rewards apply to the core career modes, which means we’re being funneled toward arcade modes like The Yard and the ever-present Madden Ultimate Team so we can climb on to the neverending game-as-a-service treadmill. MLB The Show works because it offers balanced rewards for all of its modes; in Madden, the modes still feel too siloed away from one another, which makes the global awards it does offer feel ultimately underwhelming for anyone who isn’t heavily invested in The Yard.
Of course, even if EA does refine its interface and improve on its global rewards, none of it will matter much if it doesn’t fix Face of the Franchise, arguably a symbol of everything that ails the series. Ostensibly Madden’s flagship story mode, Face of the Franchise is short, pointless, and ugly. It takes a good idea – letting us live out the dream of getting drafted into the NFL and playing out a career – and utterly fails to execute on it.
Face of the Franchise once again casts your customized character as a young star on the rise, with a story built around a series of challenges and story moments en route to the NFL Draft. College football games return in a neat bit of set dressing, but are hardly integrated into the overall story and quickly forgotten. The handful of choices you make – whether to attend a Nike event or take the team out to dinner, for example – are almost always a strictly mechanical means of boosting your stats or earning more currency for purchasing in-game items, with little impact on the story. The impact of the story choices you do get to make, such as when you talk to scouts before the Draft, are hazy at best. And when the second season of your NFL career rolls around, your character is still referred to as a rookie, as if Roger Goodell hit some cosmic reset button.
This is Face of the Franchise’s third year, and it’s hard to get a read on EA’s intentions for the mode. Is it story-driven wish fulfillment? A glorified tutorial? All of the above? I have a sneaking suspicion it’s that last option, which is why it feels so messy and unfocused. As with everything else in Madden, an extra layer of polish would do Face of the Franchise a world of good – a character progression system that isn’t needlessly obscured, a better sense of how rewards can be spent across the various modes, and a finale that doesn’t consist of a handful of NFL players offering congratulations in hastily recorded cellphone videos. Madden’s biggest problem seems to be that it’s trying to be all things to all football fans. It wants to be an in-depth sim and a silly arcade game and a competitive multiplayer game, and it wants to do all of it with roughly 10 months of development time per year.
With the new console generation fully underway, I get the impression that Madden would like to be perceived in the same light as SoFi Stadium or Allegiant Stadium – a glittering showcase arena for football. But it’s still much closer to the multipurpose stadiums of old; the big concrete bowls that would host baseball on Saturday, football on Sunday, and monster truck rallies on Monday. The NFL long ago abandoned multipurpose stadiums like the Metrodome, recognizing that their dedication to utility meant that they could provide a gameday experience that was at best functional. As Madden looks to the future, it might want to consider how it can learn from the NFL’s example.
