Madden NFL 17

Madden NFL 17 does one hell of a job at emulating all the on-filed action right in your living room!

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Madden NFL 17 is the perfect blend of technical yet accessible game play that a game like this needs. It’s technical enough to keep the die hard players satisfied, yet keeps those same mechanics simple for newer or not so advanced players coming back for more. While I’d still keep away from the random online match ups in things like Madden Ultimate Teams due to that being fore the more hardcore crowd, I’d happily give playing the Franchise mode a go with my friends once again.

Madden has finally found its comfort zone between the tackles, and offense and defense have reached a great balance. The community’s gameplay wishes were granted with a new focus on Franchise mode, led by the Play the Moments feature. Outside of its mood-killing commentators, Madden 17 is just about everything we’ve been waiting for since EA Sports took full control of the NFL license. Football is back, and it’s only a yard or two short of becoming an all-time great.

Sports games: the bane of most people's E3 conferences. They're the games that people that call themselves "Serious Moe" play. It's easy to write Madden and other sports games off as "just a roster update" – and, at times, this can be true – but the long-lived American football series has been steadily evolving over the past couple of years, and Madden NFL 17 is no different.

Smart but subtle additions rule the day in the latest edition of EA's football simulator.

Even if most players probably won't be able to recognize the subtle tweaks made to Madden NFL 17 under the hood that help it to be a superior football game, they will be able to recognize its wealth of accessibility options, its improved visuals, and that it is the most feature-rich edition of the franchise available on current-gen consoles, even without a big standout new game mode. For those that help Madden consistently become one of the best-selling games of the year, Madden NFL 17 is a no-brainer, and for those that may have stopped playing the series, it marks the perfect time to jump ba...

Of course, all stories need an ending. To the point, Madden NFL 17 is a quality Madden game. It does a lot of things right, and fixes most of the major shortcomings of previous editions. If you’ve lapsed in the series or just want to know if you should grab this year’s game, go forward knowing that you will get a lot of mileage from it. It’s good. At the same time, however, it is still absolutely a Madden game, and in the 12th year of EA’s exclusivity deal with the NFL it’s hard not to pine for a little competition. Sunrise, sunset.

Good gameplay improvements and a much needed change in commentary have made the in-game experience feel fresh, but the offline game modes have largely been ignored with the same boring options except for the minor inclusion of game planning that is generally determined by the CPU anyways. Madden is fun, but running game improvements aren't enough to suggest that this is worthy of another $60 purchase.