EA Sports Madden NFL 27 - PS5 Review

EA Sports Madden NFL 27 by developer EA Tiburon and publisher Electronic Arts—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

It’s that time of the year again – where I revisit what’s arguably my favorite video game franchise. EA Sports Madden NFL 27 returns to the field with its latest batch of changes, some minor and others more notable. Is it worth taking this year’s iteration out for a spin? I think by and large the target audience – NFL fans such as myself who have a long history with the series, the answer is going to be yes. For more casual fans who tend to only pick up these games every few years after a bunch of changes have had a chance to build up? This year’s offering is probably a bit less compelling, but still a whole lot of fun.

EA Sports Madden NFL 27 is a bit of a mouthful for a series so well known that it just goes by ‘Madden’ in my social circles. I’ve been playing this series since it was released on the Sega Genesis way back in 1990. I’m old, don’t worry, I’m aware. While a lot has changed since then, not as much tends to change from year to year. Now, there’s this tired, lazy argument (often from people who don’t even regularly play the games in the series) that it’s never anything more than a roster update. That’s clearly untrue as well.

Certainly, there are roster updates, but there’s a lot more to Madden 27 than that. Some of the changes are immediate, especially where it comes to the gameplay. Pre-snap menus have overgone the same facelift that EA Sports College Football 27 (you can read our review here) did, where there’s fewer menu layers. It takes a bit of getting used to after years of the ‘old way’, but it’s pretty intuitive once I learned it. 

Mode-wise, there’s no big shocks here. We have the Madden Ultimate Team (MUT), which is a fantasy sports / card collecting hybrid that really leans into EA’s microtransactions to speed up the grind. It’s an alright mode – never one of my favorites. As someone who does collect sports cards and enjoys fantasy football, it feels like a mode I should love, but there’s so much ‘push’ to get currency (either through lots of grinding or spending more money), that it kills the vibe for me personally. There’s some quick modes, a fairly thorough training mode and probably the two meatiest modes: Franchise and Superstar.

First, Superstar is where we see most of the connective tissue between this game and College Football 27. Your created characters can graduate into Madden where you put them through the Combine to do mini-games that help demonstrate the player’s stats. You can choose to go to a team of your choice or just let the draft play out. From there you play, gain experience, improve – it’s a fun gameplay loop. I appreciate that like College Football this year, there’s three new positions to play – Tight End, Free Safety and Edge. I’d love to see a couple more niche positions added (like DT, which is what I usually take when I play the game). It feels like your Superstar has a bit more influence on the franchise and their decisions (not unlike some other sports titles like NBA 2K0, which is a nice touch. But really the best feature is just the progression mode, which is much more flexible than the last couple of years. 

Most of my time with this series is spent in Franchise Mode. This is old hat for me. For perspective, my buddies and I back in college used to swap our shared PlayStation 2 memory card around between classes and work to play our next game and advance the week to our shared franchise seasons. Online certainly creates far smoother shared experience opportunities and frankly constructing your roster, developing the players, growing your coaches and rolling through multiple seasons with offseason activities such as drafting and free agency is still a whole lot of fun. 

There’s a bit more depth to those simulation aspects of Franchise management. The contract negotiations feel far less stale with more of a game of back and forth that at times can surprise you with how the player reacts, but by and large is more interesting than the old static offer made and either outright accepted or refused. This is in part due to the tie-in negotiations have with the Persona Engine that was interested this year. It’s meant to have more personality traits. Young eager players might put in more work and develop better than older entitles ones, or perhaps a veteran near the end of their career holds on for one more season to try and win the big one. These personality quirks show up in the contract negotiations as some players care more about money, or winning, or other factors that could impact their willingness to take the contract you propose. This can also show up in having a player who is out-performing their contact suddenly holding out for a better deal. 

The weekly management was a bit odd at first, with these summarized ‘areas’ where you can manually do things yourself or delegate and let the system handle certain activities such as weekly practice or scouting draft picks. It was a little bumpy for me at first as I accidentally closed out a negotiation attempt not realizing I couldn’t get it back on the screen afterwards. Also in a few instances I was annoyed by things like my preferred training or playbook packages not being remembered week-by-week and forcing me to re-select stuff every time. Overall, it’s not a bad system, but there’s warts. 

I will say the overall presentation is excellent. My wife likes to joke that the greatest innovation Madden ever made was licensing actual music back for the 2003 version of the game. I get it from her standpoint – she’s not listening to the same one or two generic songs repeatedly for hours while I work through menus as I upgrade my team. This year’s selection of songs is really good – thoroughly enjoyable. Once the gameplay starts, the visuals and sound are excellent. Weather conditions can show up in the field of play, they impact things like kicker accuracy, and the uniforms get muddied up. The announcing is pretty good this season. It’s built on the same basic structure as past years, and there’s repeat lines from the last couple of years in there, but it’s a broad array of different commentators and one thing I really appreciate is how they talk about the season more effectively. It’s subtle, but to have them call out that a player scooped up a fumble two games in a row, or talking about the trend a team’s offense has been on over weeks adds a bit more realistic authenticity to things, as though there’s heightened awareness to the season as a whole, and the presentation is certainly better for it. It breathes a lot more life into the franchise mode.

Now, one of my biggest grumbles about franchise mode is going to be a bit of a lather, rinse and repeat of what I said in my College Football 27 review. Why, for the love of Pete, can’t we bring draft classes in from that Dynasty mode into Madden’s Franchise mode. I’m sure there’s NIL considerations and a desire not to have to double-pay college athletes being imported in, but EA tries to sell these games as a tandem and the connective tissue is just not there yet. It’s better in the Superstar mode, but it struggles in Franchise. Additionally, I was shocked to see how poorly the coaches in the two modes sync up. There’s an option to import College code data in to influence your Madden coach during creation, but it never seems to work quite right. Conversely in College Football 27, there’s different archetypes you can spend your development points on, including one for people who own Madden 27, except it doesn’t work with existing coaches. You have to start your Dynasty all over with a new coach to enable it now? Why would you do that with a game that’s been out a couple of months already. I’m on season seven – I’m not going to restart just because the developers didn’t fully bake the compatibility between games, and from what I’ve seen online? There’s a lot of other players who feel the exact same way.

As for the gameplay itself, Madden 27 is polished and feels a bit closer to the College football game this year than the last couple. I consider that a good thing as I’ve generally enjoyed College Football more the last two years, and here the gap has been narrowed. The new contested catch mechanic where you can time your catches to increase your success in pulling the ball down is actually pretty fun. I’ve seen some absolutely amazing and entertaining catches (both offensively and defensively) play out as the ball bounces around. There’s still a bit of wonky physics that comes out to play here and there, but by and large the engine handles having two teams of eleven banging into each other at high speeds throughout the contest.

In all, EA Sports Madden NFL Football is an improvement over last year’s solid formula, though for me it mostly showed up in the Franchise mode. That’s okay, as that’s where I spend the bulk of my time, but I’m still a little disappointed in the lack of solid connectivity between this title and EA Sports College Football 27. Across the board we have some newly polished features that make Madden a lot of fun, but mileage may vary on if there’s enough changes over last year to justify this year’s iteration.

Score: 7.5 / 10