The Madden NFL 22 franchise gets a belated update, but is that enough?

Every year Madden NFL seems to have a blatantly sloppy mode. The big news: best news about Madden NFL 22: That mode is Madden Ultimate Team.

For once, MUT is the way to beg. For once, Madden Ultimate Team is the mode that receives a maintenance level update from last year. Good! Madden fans have long resented MUT, for all its microtransactions and monetization, accusing it of soaking up what little oxygen the one-year development cycle leaves behind, while the core features and gameplay are breathless and semi-conscious. But for Madden NFL 22, EA Tiburon stood firm on MUT, and that’s just a message to the community, just as much as the overdue improvements to Franchise mode and the much-needed update.

However, moderate your expectations; Madden NFL 22 It doesn’t immediately feel like transformative work, even on the first list of choices players can make with the redesigned franchise mode. (The main menu and the center are basically the same as in last year’s game, for example.) In the game, particularly, I felt like I was picking up right where I left off. Madden 21. I even plugged in the same sliders and game options that I used last year and found that pretty much everything behaved as expected.

Madden NFL 22The virtues are slower. Take Gameday Momentum, the new upgrade and enhancement module that affects games in all modes. Gameday Momentum doesn’t seem like much, until it seems like a lot. It’s basically a meter at the top of the screen that looks a bit like a fighting game. Each team has two milestones on that meter, seemingly chosen at random, game by game, where good things or bad things happen to them for the other team. The home team has a third benefit, inspired by the real-life atmosphere or the advantage that their stadium brings. The home team starts the game with this buff already on. So, in Washington, rival running backs will find it increasingly difficult to play and change direction, right out of the box.

In week 2 of my first game, I dropped two scores against the Washington, but come on, it’s the Washington, I’ll go a long way with Saquon Barkley and we’ll be back. Yeah, not with Barkley waddling like a kindergarten kid holding a BM. His cuts and jukes were nerfed on his first carry, and the game told me this would only get worse. I may have rebooted this game … just to play a more conservative offense and less reliance on my star running back.

Another example of Gameday Momentum lurking in another early game – I wasn’t really paying attention to the fact that the Giants had fallen early until I pulled the right trigger to see the game diagram and wondered what the hell I was looking at. . That wasn’t the play I called, was it? But cognitive dissonance and game clock dwindling fooled me into thinking that I had mistakenly called incline path game.

No, I had called for a run off tackle for Devontae Booker, but by falling behind, I activated a Gameday Momentum nerf that shows me the wrong play art before the snap, simulating the confusion my team faced when it came to the end. line of scrimmage. Booker took the transfer as planned, that caught me off guard and dragged me down at a loss.

If the Superstar X-Factors that Madden introduced two years ago didn’t catch your eye, I rarely cared, unless these power-ups involved a player I created, then Gameday Momentum will make you worry now. One of the nerfs you can get, or fight against, prevents a superstar player from entering “the zone.” The zone is where the really good things happen for the best players, and in Franchise, you can change the zone abilities for the superstars on your team. Giving Barkley the advantage of breaking the freight train rigging makes him nearly unstoppable. But if I see this “Zoned Out” icon at the beginning of the game, that absolutely reinforces my game. do do not I want Saquon to be banished from said Zone.

At Franchise, I see more of my players’ talents and limitations across the board, thanks to the biggest daily change out there – the weekly practice and progression cycle. In past Maddens, practices supposedly gave an advantage to certain plays in the next game: deep pitches on offense or zone blitzes on defense. But it was always difficult to know if I had ever won anything by sticking to this supposed game plan. In Madden NFL 22, the practice is now a background simulator rather than a minigame exercise, but franchise players are tasked with monitoring their players’ fatigue and keeping their group positional without full pads, for example if they are worn out. Players can also sustain injuries on practice time, as defensive back James Bradberry did in my first week of camp.

As for the game plan, I learned that you can’t really deviate from it or you’ll burn out, even with the Jets, in the first week of preseason. In testing this new practice and approach to the game plan, I wondered if it could go against the AI-recommended defensive approach of stopping the outside run. My overall instruction for defense would be to focus on filling in runs between tackles; I’d take care of the outside race myself, with user-controlled players and defensive audibles. Essentially, he was trying to have both.

No. He was told to focus on the middle, the Giants defense focused like hell in the middle, and the Jets’ Tevin Coleman went berserk in his only quarter of service, making three huge sweeps for 41 yards. You may have also restarted this game.

The new franchise benefit tree for the coaching staff is something else that looks like embroidery at first. This is mainly because the costs of the benefits are very high and you accumulate the Personnel Points to buy them at a very slow rate. Meeting all my game day goals for my head coach, offensive and defensive coordinators still returned 13 personnel points, and the first available perk in my head coach tree costs 20. But this kind of slow growth It’s fitting, remembering how dominated my created players would get in a single season of last year’s Madden. And now I’m motivated to rack up the benefits and develop my created coach, to really think long-term about this Giants team, rather than being their caretaker for just a season or two.

However, there is an advantage in the future for the head coach called “The Final Piece” that worries me. With it, all players get extra XP as if their playstyle matches my head coach’s schematic and game manual. I have rarely thought of developing my own scheme at past Maddens, rather than playing the cards that have been dealt to me, working to the strengths of that group, and then welding the roster with the best draft picks and free agents available. While “The Final Piece” may encourage schematic experimentation, it could also obviate the need to choose any offensive or defensive schema, much less recruiting or hiring players to suit it.

Franchise mode in Madden NFL 22 It shows his newfound depth within training camp and the first few weeks of an NFL season, even if unlocking him and really seeing what he has to offer will take a little longer. Additionally, some even more sophisticated systems, such as searching for players for the next NFL Draft, will be added as post-launch content. But there’s no question that Franchise is a loud and clear “received” gesture from EA Tiburon, giving veteran players the changes they’ve always wanted to make. (Like hiring and firing coordinators. It is a way to avoid the slow accumulation of personnel points and to obtain assistants with great advantages from the first moment).

Yet, Madden NFL 22The franchise is by far the most technocratic and least personal of all the licensed sports simulation career modes, and it gets in the way of making this a personal obsession. Other players may feel differently. But the game’s presentation and user interface do little to soften that nondescript feel. If anything, it makes it feel even more corporate and impersonal. This is likely due to the sport itself, as NBA 2K and MLB The Show’s team control modes are a distant second to their fascinating single-player career modes. But in Madden, just like in real life, the team comes first and the players are more resources than characters.

Yet, Madden NFL 22The franchise doesn’t give me such a rich pop-up narrative, nor the feeling that I’m really shaping the outcome of a team or a league. Training trees can be an RPG element, but there’s not much real RPG in Franchise. Part of this disappointment comes from another unfortunate Face of the Franchise mode, which I will address in a future article. But Franchise has two other roles to pursue with the team: solo player and owner. And, yeah, oh, it sounds so routine, but it’s still true, no race had any changes or improvements from last year’s game.

But hey, at least I can’t blame Madden Ultimate Team for that.

Madden NFL 22 released August 20 Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Windows PERSONAL COMPUTER, Xbox One, Y Xbox Series X. The game was played using the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 download codes provided by Electronic Arts. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.