Madden 22 is an odd game. I’ve written previously that FIFA 22 could be a huge leap for the football sim as it moves onto current-gen consoles. Madden, despite being made by the same company and having all the resources for a similar leap, never convinced me it was capable of doing the same. So it has proved. I could be especially hilarious here, throwing in football metaphors, accusing the game of going long and fumbling, but it doesn’t feel like any on-the-field analogies are appropriate. Instead, it often feels like you’re in the pre-game meeting, flicking through spreadsheets and rewinding the same play over and over again. Madden 22 is too damn slow.
Madden is typically slower than both FIFA and NBA by a considerable margin. In some ways, that’s difficult to avoid. Football (the American kind) is much slower than football (the proper kind). But then, football (the proper kind, and no, I will not be using soccer) is considerably slower than basketball, yet NBA and FIFA don’t feel too far apart. NBA is a little snappier, but FIFA never feels sluggish. FIFA leans into arcade stylings a little more than Pro Evo – now known as eFootball – but it remains a real proper football sim, and consistently increases its pace to just about keep up with NBA 2K.
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Madden is way off the pace. While comparisons to FIFA and NBA may seem unfair, Madden is also slower than Cricket 19 and MLB: The Show. Cricket and baseball are famously slow games – a cricket match literally takes five days, and still often ends in a draw – yet they manage to feel fast in virtual form. Madden, try as it might, cannot do the same.
And that really is the issue here. Madden is trying. It’s trying harder than N’Golo Kante – that’s a metaphor from proper football. Madden keeps introducing new modes designed to speed the game up. While Face of the Franchise continues to be a big swing and a miss – that’s a baseball metaphor, we’re hitting all the sports today – letting you skip certain incidents should be a slam dunk. Instead, it’s getting caught LBW. Sports!
Basically, Face of the Franchise is Madden’s Be a Pro mode, letting you take control of one specific player throughout their career. The idea is you go on a personal journey, but it all ends up a bit CW. Anyway, it lets you skip parts that don’t specifically involve you, which you’d think would make everything faster, but there’s So. Much. Drama. Around every little thing that getting from game to game takes forever.
But okay, that’s a story mode. Nobody watches Rudy to see the game, right? Superstar KO and The Yard are also supposed to speed things up, but they’re so married to what football is. Every play needs to be analytically chosen, every down has 17 different options on what to do next, and if a single inch of the HUD isn’t filled with arrows, circles, button prompts, or information, Madden considers that space wasted.
It doesn’t need to be this way, especially not in the spin-off modes. Madden doesn’t need to completely reinvent itself. It doesn’t have FIFA’s popularity, but then American football doesn’t have proper football’s pull. Still, while the base modes can continue to be tactically deep and analytical, there is room for The Yard to experiment. It clearly fancies itself as NFL Street, much like Volta does FIFA Street. In both cases though, these modes are held back by sticking too close to their own game. FIFA Volta uses the same skill moves as the base game, which means it misses out on the cheat-and-get-away-with-it ridiculousness of FIFA Street, as well as the more cartoonish interpretation of football. Meanwhile, though NFL Street did have set plays, it took them less seriously and afforded players far more freedom than Madden and The Yard currently do.
If Madden was a slow game by design, then we’d just have to learn to live with it. American football matches often go on for several hours despite technically being a 60-minute game, after all. But Madden is clearly trying to up the pace – it just keeps failing. FIFA is miles ahead of Madden, and it’s baffling that our American cousin refuses to learn.
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