Video Game Review: Gameplay Refinements Elevate New ‘Madden NFL 13’

CHICAGO – “Madden NFL 13” opens with a rousing monologue from everyone’s favorite justice-obstructing Ravens linebacker, Ray Lewis. Sitting in a dimly lit and smokey locker room, he extols the virtue of hard work, tenacity, and pride, as images from the prior NFL season are projected on the lockers before seamlessly transforming into footage from the game, highlighting its shiny new physics engine.

Video Game Rating: 4.0/5.0

For all it’s celebrated success, “Madden” has almost always been devoid of personality, and in this case, borrowed some of Ray Lewis’s for this grand opening sequence. However, the journey of this EA Sports cash cow has always been one of functionality, not poetry. Ever since buying out the competition with an exclusive NFL license that practically guarantees they get to create and release these games in a competition-less vacuum, the capitalist intentions of this venerable football franchise have preceded everything else. This year, gamers were told, things would be different (again). New gameplay engine, new career mode, Kinect integration, Madden Ultimate Team in a beefier incarnation, and dozens of other little adjustments have this “Madden” game, on paper, looking like the best in the series.

Madden NFL 13
Photo credit: EA Sports

The Infinity engine is this year’s game-changer. Much like 2010’s “Backbreaker,” the on-field players have real momentum and weight, and tackles are animated procedurally instead of via canned animations. For all of the half-promises and weak features that have been added over the years, they’ve finally gotten one right. This new engine is killer, at least between the whistles.

Madden NFL 13 Photo credit: EA Sports

The beauty of the engine comes from playing a game with a team you know well. Playing as my beloved Patriots, it became glaringly obvious how bad my secondary was, how shaky my O-line truly is, and how gosh-darn tough Wes Welker can be. Instead of a player being a collection of numbers (94 speed, 86 catching, and so on), the physics engine takes into account size, height, and weight. As a result, a 69 overall HB with 99 speed isn’t going to be burning up defenses anytime soon because once he comes in contact with a stronger, taller, bigger player, he’s going to get walloped. A player like Larry Fitzgerald becomes a true beast because he’s finally able to use that tall long body of his to make some vertical catches, whereas before he was best in intermediate routes.

But the infinity engine is not perfect. While the action is sweet and brutal during a play with folks flying around the field, defensive linemen being pancaked, and QBs being sacked in deliciously chaotic ways, after the whistle blows there are a few irksome idiosyncrasies that arise. Legs will bend at inuman angles, players will lay motionless on the field as if their injured (but aren’t), and often times a player will be seen laying on the field one second, then be shown in a post-play cut-scene walking around and looking for the play call from the QB. These little graphical errors don’t directly affect the gameplay, but can take you out of the overall experience, much like how in “Madden NFL 05” all the players had a habit of bounding up and down together in unison on their way back to the huddle.

Madden NFL 13 Photo credit: EA Sports

Those issues aside, the gameplay is smooth and familiar. Some of the more exciting tweaks on offense include the ability to pump fake to a chosen receiver, and having the defense react realistically to it. You can also control the length of time you fake the play action pass before bringing up the passing icons. Another pleasant touch, by way of the new physics engine, is that elite wide receivers blow by press coverage easily, to the point where the “release” stat in the depth chart may be the most important one for a receiver. On defense, things remain largely the same gameplay wise. There’s the ability to assume control of a defensive back and make an aggressive play for the ball by holding the ‘Y’ button on an Xbox 360. It’s fun to gamble using this feature, but it has a habit of biting you in the Belichick if you’re not careful.

The defense is as interception happy as ever (I threw an unheard of 26 Ints to 45 TDs in my franchise). One area of annoyance is on the defensive playcalling screen, you can’t ascertain down and distance unless you pause the game, or remember from the previous play. Kinect Integration is limited to calling out audibles and hot-routes, and works fairly well, though the embarrassment factor of shouting various football commands at your television is a bit tough to overcome.

Madden NFL 13 Photo credit: EA Sports

Ultimately, on the gameplay side of things, you probably couldn’t ask for more. The gameplay is smooth, playing against the computer proves to be a suitable challenge, and you really do need to think about your game plan if you want to have success. While there are some pretty awkward moments surrounding the gameplay experience, this year’s offering is the best game of football the franchise has ever put out. This goes a long way to making the other modes in the game worthwhile as well.

Outside of the infinity engine, the second most talked about feature of this year’s Madden is “Connected Careers,” the much-touted mode that rolls “Superstar” and “Franchise” into one dumb-sounding name. You create a coach or player (or assume the role of an active one) and you’re off to the races. There also exists an option to import a photo of yourself using EA Sport’s game face feature, but pretty much every attempt I’ve made at this has created a creature that deserves to be roaming the sewers - not the sidelines.

As a coach or player, the mode is serviceable and has considerable depth. New this year is the ability to earn XP for players and coaches. As a player you spend XP increasing various stats: Throw power, accuracy, awareness, and so on. As a coach you earn various perk packages like the ability to talk certain player positions out of retirement, or entice certain kinds of players to your team. Unfortunately, these ‘features’ of Madden’s connected career mode turns the entire shebang into a giant excel spreadsheet. Somehow spending 10,000 EXP points to increase Ben Roethlisberger’s accuracy by a single point feels a bit underwhelming compared to how it used to be in earlier games.

Madden NFL 13 Photo credit: EA Sports

Outside of the largely boring progression mechanics, scheme now plays a big factor in determining player personnel, so if you’re running a 4-3 defense and draft a big, burly, pass-rushing linebacker instead of an agile one who can play zone coverage, his rating will likely be very low on your team. If you draft a half back who can’t catch the ball and throw him into the Patriots offense, you’re pretty borked, as well. This is a welcome layer of strategy when it comes to acquiring players.

There are other little features here that are a good time too, it’s fun to scout players (though, again, it’s a glorified spreadsheet), practice serves *some* purpose by placing your team in a variety of scenarios in order to gain bonus XP, and working within your team’s chosen scheme is a reward unto itself. But these features are largely disjointed. When scouting a player, wouldn’t it be an enjoyable mini-game to watch a rookie run the forty and time it yourself via an in-game stop watch? How about the ability to interview certain players you’re interested in drafting to see what they want from a team and what they’re awareness rating is. As it stands, by the third year I wouldn’t be surprised to find most players skipping practice, and automating rookie scouting and player progressing, which essentially leaves you to play the games and not much else.

Don’t get me wrong, “Connected Careers” is still leaps and bounds beyond what we got in prior installments, Twitter integration is a neat touch, the ability to be fired if you screw up too badly gives things a good sense of pressure, and the online components are seamlessly managed via EA Sports’ website which allows you to check up on your franchise remotely. You really get the sense that this is the franchise mode that Head developer Josh Looman has always wanted to play and it’s pretty obvious this mode was crafted with great care and reverence for the little Lombardi in all of us. But hopefully next year the depth aspect won’t be completely perpendicular to the fun aspect of this mode.

Madden NFL 13 Photo credit: EA Sports

What’s missing most from “Connected Careers” is the ability to *actually* scheme and prepare for your opponents. If you ask any football player, or coach, what the most important part of a successful game-plan is, it’s preparation. Tom Brady isn’t the best QB in the league because he has the strongest arm, it’s because he has the best attention span and spends untold hours in the film room studying opposing team’s tendencies.

In a career mode where players and coaches change teams from season to season, it’s invaluable information to know what sort of defense (or offense) you’re coming up against in the game. Do they blitz a lot? Are they more a zone-coverage team? Who’s their best cornerback? This is all information that is of paramount importance to accurately recreating the trials and tribulations of an NFL coach and player, and has been a glaring omission from Madden’s repertoire for years.

Of course, this could fixed by an informative and fact based commentary team. A commentary team that can speak to an individual team’s strengths and weaknesses before a game. Perhaps highlighting a player or two on each side of the ball to watch out for, or explaining what kind of defense the opposing team runs, or even what your chosen team’s strengths are.

“Madden 13” marks the debut of CBS stalwarts Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, and somehow the fact that they mumble over each other, and make mistakes on commentary is being lauded as a naturalistic feature. After three years of building up the amount of commentary included from Cris Collinsworth and Gus Johnson to a point where, ya know, not *every* other play had the same useless babble, the producers of “Madden” decided to change out the commentators for the third (well fourth if you count the Tom Hammond debacle) this generation, and start from scratch. Which would be fine if they had something interesting to say.

Madden NFL 13 Photo credit: EA Sports

The commentators speak in such excruciating generalities that it takes away from the experience. If I throw a long incompletion to a covered wideout, often times Phil Simms will go on about how wide-open the receiver was, and that I overthrew him. If I toss a pass to a receiver, and it bounces directly into the oven mitts of a Linebacker, Phil Simms, who I’m convinced must be having a stroke in the broadcast booth, will exclaim what a horrible decision I made. It seems like they had Phil Simms and Jim Nantz record a few takes per largely general scenario (incomplete pass, short pass, interception), didn’t bother to get into the specifics, then had the game pick at random which canned conversation to play, making things repetitive and asinine on the audio front.

Ultimately, “Madden NFL 13” is everything it promised to be with few surprises or truly juicy bits. It’s a four-door sedan that gets good gas milage and has a few bells and whistles to keep the kiddies entertained on long car rides. The infinity engine is dynamic and makes every play exciting despite noticeable visual foibles. “Connected Careers” contains the depth of an excel spreadsheet but is unfortunately about as exciting as one, too. “Madden Ultimate Team” continues to be addictive and fun, but skews far too much toward acquiring the best cards versus actual strategic game planning. But, for the first time in a long time, the game seems to at the least mean well. It’s a weird intangible, but between the infinity engine and connected careers, you get the sense the franchise is in good hands for the first time in a long time. Now lets just fix that commentary and we’d be getting somewhere.

By Paul Meekin
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com