Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Mario Super Sluggers 18 year old Baseball Game
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
All EA SPORTS MADDEN NFL 27 REVIEWS
VIDEO REVIEWS
EA SPORTS MADDEN NFL 27 REVIEW – POSITIVE MOMENTUM
by: RHETT WASELENCHUK
First things first: this is the best-looking football game EA has ever shipped. Player faces, for the most part, are convincing recreations of their real-life counterparts. Body types finally vary the way NFL rosters do. Watching Puka Nacua’s frame up close, compared to a lineman’s, sold me on the jump immediately. Pregame introductions are also on point, with pyrotechnics, tunnel walks, and stadium-specific flourishes that drip with authentic atmosphere. My only complaint is timing. Those sequences don’t reach the nuance EA packs into College Football 27’s campus pageantry. Worse, they cut off abruptly, feeling more like a dropped connection than a deliberate transition into kickoff. It’s a small blemish on an otherwise gorgeous package, but it’s noticeable enough that I hope for a patch.
A Solid Presentation Package
Another big part of Madden 27’s solid presentation package is the commentary team. It caught me off guard how well Mike Tirico and Greg Olsen carry a broadcast here. For the most part, their back-and-forth follows the rhythm of an actual game rather than firing off canned lines half a second late. Olsen in particular drops the kind of situational nuggets you’d expect from a color analyst who watched last week’s tape. Of course, it isn’t perfect. They aren’t always on cue, and I’ve certainly heard some flat-out wrong calls. But when it works, it works quite well.
Presentation aside, Madden 27 revolves around its two main modes, Franchise and Superstar. Superstar mode wisely opens at the Combine. It’s clear EA put effort into representing the event instead of treating it as a menu screen. The drills come across as authentic and, admittedly, fun. Each station brings its own pacing and pressure. Are you slow? Are you incapable of more than a few bench press reps? That’ll tank your draft stock before you ever throw a pass. That stock matters more than in past years, too. Where you land and the size of your rookie contract feed directly into your credibility and experience once games start. A modest deal on a rebuilding roster nets you less per snap than a proven starter’s contract. This gives players early-career dilemma decisions that are surprisingly intriguing.
Going for GOAT
That high-stakes intrigue carries into the redesigned G.O.A.T. Journey. It frames your entire career around three tracked pillars: Skill, Legacy, and Popularity. Every award, milestone, and highlight-reel play helps those numbers. A community leaderboard lets you measure your climb against every other Superstar grinding toward Canton. Three new positions, Tight End, Edge Rusher, and Free Safety, open up build paths the mode has never offered. Cap Breakers add another layer, letting committed players bend an archetype into something the game didn’t originally design. Retirement isn’t just an exit screen anymore either. It leads into an actual Hall of Fame vote, complete with a ceremony and speech. Plus, there’s ongoing live content to tackle throughout the real NFL season.
All of that is to say that I’m pleasantly surprised by Superstar mode. It’s still missing some of the personal decisions I’d like to see when playing as a solo player as opposed to a whole team, but this is a big step in the right direction.
Franchise mode also sees significant upgrades this year, thanks to EA’s Persona Engine. Every player on every roster now has a distinct personality profile. These shape everything, like how they negotiate, how they react to being benched, whether they’re content grinding through a rebuild, or even lobbying for a trade. Contract talks also reflect the player profiles directly. Negotiations no longer mean sliding a number up until you’ve ticked off the CPU’s hidden checklist. They now play out across multiple sessions, with visible interest and patience meters. Occasionally a curveball demand pops up, forcing you to adjust on the fly. A star receiver chasing a ring reacts to your offer differently than one chasing guaranteed money. Seeing those priorities clash with your cap situation is oddly satisfying, but more importantly, immersive in a way Madden hasn’t been for years.
This is Madden, Afterall
But this is EA, and this is Madden, and you just knew it wasn’t all going to be sweet. The new timing-based catch mechanic is hit or miss. Holding the catch button and releasing inside a meter’s green zone genuinely raises the skill ceiling for contested throws. It rewards preparation over pure ratings, the way the shot meter mirrors rhythm in NBA 2K. My problem isn’t the meter itself; it’s what comes after you nail it. Far too often, a receiver drops a pass despite a clean release. He’s undone by the faintest brush from a defender who barely got a hand up. I’ve watched a receiver’s route die to contact so light you’d swear a gentle breeze would kill the poor fella.
And don’t get me started on the collision issues. In my very first game, one of my linebackers buried a receiver with a monster hit. It should have ended the play outright. Instead, the receiver bounced off him and slid roughly ten feet to the right, as if he’d hit a patch of ice. He then trotted down the field for about 75 yards. Brutal. This obviously wasn’t an isolated issue, either. By the time my review period was up, I must have seen this sort of nonsense dozens of times.
Did Madden 27 change in the ways that matter most? I guess it depends on who you ask. If you’re looking for the next generation of Madden’s on-field action, you might as well pound sand. This isn’t to say I didn’t have fun with it; it’s just a very typical, buggy, EA Sports Madden experience. But, I gotta say, the Franchise and Superstar modes have both seen a ton of improvements that have me coming back for more.
Madden keeps trending in the right direction, slowly but surely. It’s getting to a better place. It just hasn’t arrived yet.
The Good
Genuinely gorgeous
Superstar mode has higher stakes
Franchise mode is much more in-depth
75
Madden NFL Football 27 Review
ign.com
From the first pregame animation I watched, Madden NFL 27 had a presence I haven't felt in this series a while. The expressions of the players, the roar of the crowd, and even the coaching staff on the sidelines felt right, as if I was watching Week 1 six weeks early. That good first impression only grew as I dug into each mode, finding tweaks to the passing game and an improved Franchise mode that make it a noticeable improvement on its predecessor. It's not at Hall of Fame status yet, with some noticeable technical hiccups and an Ultimate Team in need of a shakeup, but Madden 27 is definitely trending in the right direction. EA Sports may be on to something here.
For starters, the reworked passing game is instantly impactful thanks to a new Timing-Based Catch mechanic. After passing the ball to a receiver, when I hold down the catch button, a meter will appear over my receiver's head. If I release the button in the meter's green zone, the receiver gains an advantage over the defender, which usually results in a completed pass. Conversely, if I hold the button too long or release it too quickly, I run the risk of dropping the pass, or worse, deflecting it to a defender.
This is an ingenious system that emphasizes how the quarterback and receiver should work in tandem on every pass play. I've been able to aim my passes and adjust the strength of the throw, but now I can also give my receiver the chance to make a spectacular play with clear and direct inputs, which makes it feel more like I was the one who brought the big catch to fruition. When that meter turns green, and the pass is completed, it's a genuine rush.
However, this new system takes a minute to lock down, as the timing can be very precise. Bullet passes are difficult to land with this method, simply because the ball is coming at the receiver quickly and my window for holding the catch button is smaller. Additionally, in modes like Quick Play where I control both the quarterback throwing the pass and the receiver catching it, it starts to feel like I'm entering fighting game move sequences with all of the button presses and directions that are required.
The new Timing-Based Catch mechanic is an ingenious system.
“
Thank goodness for the Skills Trainer, then, which returns from last year's game and once again conveniently groups all of Madden 27's changes into one tutorial mode on the main menu, which I can try as many times as I need. This is a great place to work out the timing on both the throws and the catches, along with other changes like a new tackling system that adds Conservative and Dive tackles to the mix, as well as new pass rush moves designed to get past the offensive line and into the quarterback's face.
This year's Madden looks as impressive as ever, with players, coaches, and fans that are closer to the real thing with each passing year. There are still immersion-breaking issues, however, like the time Devonta Smith celebrated a touchdown and the camera was placed inside of his body, or another time when an entire celebration was blocked by what I assume to be a fan's brown pants. Moments like this mostly just made me laugh and immediately moved on, but they still break the authentic NFL feel Madden strives for.
The in-game menus, meanwhile, are some of Madden 27's biggest struggles. Loading times cripple the experience, with even something as simple as "pressing X to proceed" resulting in a noticeable delay. God help you if you press the wrong button in Ultimate Team, especially after opening a pack, as you'll have time for a full sip of your coffee before you can get back to looking at the cards you pulled. The menus are an unavoidable, and highly noticeable, nuisance, and they will inevitably get in the way of your experience at some point.
The marquee change to Madden 27 is the Persona Engine, a new approach to Franchise mode that gives every player on your team motivations, goals, and desires. Pay your top stars well, and they'll be happy; neglect them, and you'll begin to hear words like "trade" and "holdout." Zack Baun, a starting linebacker for my beloved Philadelphia Eagles, was the first to start talking about a new contract, followed by Jalen Carter, and negotiating both was so stressful, I delegated both tasks. It ended up working out, even if the cap hit was more than I expected.
The marquee change to Madden 27 is the Persona Engine.
“
Another major factor in Franchise mode is training; I can work with individual players in minigames in order to raise their stats. These minigames range from "hey, this is fun," to "hey, this is total BS." Each position offers a range of minigames designed to focus on a particular skill, which makes sense; a lineman will have different priorities than, say, a free safety. This means the team has to cook up six or seven minigames per position, and the strain of that challenge becomes apparent pretty quickly.
Take the Wide Receiver position, for example: one minigame asks me to run around for as long as I can without getting tackled, using padded walls and a rotating obstacle positioned around the field. This is a really fun time, as trying to avoid three defenders barreling down on me by forcing them to get wrecked by the rotating obstacle got some genuine laughs.
But another requires me to evade a defender and catch passes in marked zones, in an attempt to score as many points as possible. This defender is, apparently, the greatest cornerback to ever play the game of football, because he stuck to me like glue and either broke up or straight up picked off the majority of my reps. I get that these are supposed to be challenging, but there's a fine line between "challenge" and "hair-ripping frustration," and some of these minigames inch toward making me more bald than I already am.
I ran into a similar, albeit isolated, incident in Superstar mode. As Jason Fanelli, the standout Temple Owl running back, was participating in the Combine, I was dropped into a few passing drills in order to gauge my performance. I was supposed to catch a pass in the intended zone, but more often than not, the quarterback didn't throw the ball any where near the zone. When I made the catch outside that zone, it counted negatively toward my performance, and I don't quite understand what I could have done better.
That said, once I was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the second round, Superstar mode became the same fun option I've enjoyed in years past. I like slowly getting mo re playing time as the season progresses, becoming a bigger part of the offense as I improve, and eventually turning into one of the top players on the team. The little vignettes in between, where I speak at press conferences or meet with my agent about sponsorship deals with brands like Oakley (product placement!), are fine enough, but the important part, the on-field stuff, is fun.
Ultimate Team continues to follow a simple pattern: open packs, complete challenges, get more packs, repeat.
“
Madden Ultimate Team also returns for another season, and of course it would as one of Madden's most popular modes. My Philadelphia Cream Cheeses have become a juggernaut thanks to some choice pack openings, welcoming legendary defender Luke Kuechley, current Eagles star Cooper DeJean, and Madden cover star Caleb Williams to the squad. Williams is even my backup quarterback, so I know I'm doing alright.
However, the MUT experience continues to be distilled into a simple pattern: open packs, complete challenges, get more packs, repeat. I can take my team online against other MUTers, but other than the unique roster I've fostered, it's just the core Madden 27 gameplay again. Granted, "don't fix what isn't broken" certainly applies to a mode that many people enjoy, but after opening pack after pack, it just doesn't stand out from previous years. I'm not sure how you improve on MUT, but it needs something to breathe some fresh air into it.
To its credit, however, the controversial microtransaction push that caused a stir in the College Football 27 community doesn’t make it to the big leagues. I see ads for new MUT packs, of course, but the Cream Cheeses squad I've built so far has been constructed without me spending a single extra dollar, and I'm happy with the results.
Verdict
Madden NFL 27 sports another year of great on-field action, including an improved catching mechanic that works really well once you get the timing down. It’s also made a few improvements to its key modes, such as Franchise's Persona engine. There are still some rough patches that would occasionally frustrate me, like the Combine in Superstar mode, or fail to hold my interest, like Ultimate Team's "same old same old" feeling. None of those are distracting enough to drag the overall package down too far. Like a seasoned veteran, Madden is still waiting for that big breakout season, but it continues to move the needle in ways that matter year after year.
Madden NFL 27 Review
8
Review scoring
Great
Madden NFL 27 sports another year of great on-field action, including an improved catching mechanic that works really well once you get the timing down.
It’s Time To Accept Madden Is Good Again
On the field, Madden keeps improving, so why am I still seeing the same tired arguments online?
By Mark Delaney on August 18
For my entire life, sports games have lived under the shadow of a particular criticism: “same game, different year.” It was never literally true, of course, but has often reasonably captured the sentiments of millions of players who jump into annualized sports sims year after year. EA’s NFL sim Madden may be the most common target of this flavor of feedback.
There have been years when I, too, was very disappointed with Madden. It was taking the sport I love most and fumbling it every August. But for five years now, it’s felt less true, and at this point, with Madden NFL 27, we just have to admit Madden is good again.
To be fair, I had even higher praise for Madden 26 than you’ll find in this Madden 27 review, which takes a slight step back in some ways, but none of those shortcomings can be found on the virtual field itself. It’s the continued gameplay improvements that keep Madden from succumbing once more to formerly reliable memes and criticisms. The Tiburon team has been building and iterating on its foundational gameplay in clear and beneficial ways on a timeline that, to my mind, began with Madden 23. It culminates with this year’s game, which feels better than ever when you step onto the gridiron.
Defense is the key. Despite my career-high praise of last year’s game, something shook it to its core a month or two after launch, breaking the pass rush for the duration of the game’s time in the sun. It resulted in a Madden experience where games routinely went over 90 total points scored. In my competitive Madden league, I even saw some players score upwards of 70+ several times. Defense was sickly. Madden 27 is medicine.
This year’s game focuses intensely on giving players more control over their players and improving things like zone coverage and pass rushing, in particular. In last year’s game, it felt like you needed a sixth sense as the user on D to make a stop. With smarter zone coverage, you can rely on AI defenders. Players won’t spectate from the middle of their zone anymore, as they now “look for work,” diagnosing a play’s progression and playing proactively rather than reactively. Along with new tools to play conservatively, aggressively, or their ultra variants, you can now better prepare for what you think you know before the ball is snapped.
These new shoulder-button commands are part of a complete remap of the pre-play adjustments. These take some getting used to, as they reconfigure years of muscle memory for longtime Madden players, but it’s a worthy learning curve to run down, because the end result gives you not just more options, but options that are much quicker to activate.
Things that may have taken four or five button presses in past games now take just two, and with new custom adjustments, you can create your own macro adjustments, bundling a set of would-be individual changes all in one go. For example, if you think you know what play your opponent is running, you can quickly activate a macro that adjusts your defensive line spacing, cornerback shading, and LB zone depth in ways that you feel counter that play correctly, all with the press of two buttons.
Macro adjustments and a streamlined controller remap are changes made for the diehards, and I love them.
It’s truly revolutionary and speaks to Madden’s renewed energy spent on serving the diehard community first and foremost. Even if macros sound too sweaty, you can use those provided by default, never having to jump into the game’s menus to create your own. It’s not as sexy a feature as the awesome new holiday game presentation, but in my mind, these new tools are the defining feature of Madden 27.
As deep as these new tools go to help defense, many of them work on both sides of the ball, and the offense actually gets an exclusive new toy, too. Timing-based catching came to both of EA’s American football games this summer, and Madden has the benefit of learning from College Football’s launch-week struggles. Similarly to timing your NBA 2K shot release in the green zone, timing-based catching asks Madden players to snag the ball at the moment it hits your hands. I’ve taken about two weeks to make up my mind on this optional new mechanic, which you can toggle off. I was skeptical and worried at first, but I’ve settled on using it. It adds more player input to plays, removing some of the Madden Math–as those in my league like to call it when the game’s attributes algorithm calculates who wins or loses any scuffle on a play.
My only concern right now is that finding the sweet spot will be a months-long quest for the studio, as it reacts to players saying it’s too powerful or not powerful enough. I hope it can settle into something predictable and reliable. If it does, I believe we’ll see the team iterate on the feature in welcome ways for years to come. If it never quite lands right with the wider community, it may go the way of QB Vision: quickly swept out of the game. But for me, and for now, I like it.
For many, including me, Franchise is the destination mode, and for the second straight year, the mode actually delivers some big changes that I enjoy. The marquee addition here is the Persona Engine, which assigns every player a number of personality traits, then makes dealing with them on your roster an interpersonal minigame. Players may have a team-first mindset, or they may be driven by money over all things. They may be quick to annoy or helpfully patient. They may be near the end of their career and seeking to close it out with a title, or they might demand a trade because you didn’t offer them a contract that they felt respected their efforts.
Something like this has been in Madden in recent years, but it’s only been relevant during free agency, and even then, hasn’t been very influential. This year, it’s actually a big deal and will undoubtedly reshape your roster in unpredictable ways. A football team is 53 players, and for the first time ever, you’ll feel like you’re coaching 53 unique individuals.
Every negotiation is its own experience.
This is made better by an overhaul to how contracts are offered. For a long time, Madden’s deals would reflect only one format: year-over-year pay increases. That might sound typical at your job, but it’s not nearly true of the NFL, and now Madden captures these nuances. You can negotiate to add void years, rearrange the salary versus bonus money, apply no-trade clauses, and a number of other options that dynamically become available during contract talks, which now happen all throughout the season, rather than having a bunch of guys ready to discuss contracts in Week 3 like the old way Madden did deal-making.
It’s important to note that, though I didn’t see many head-scratching deals in my Franchise sessions, social media has featured several in the first few days since Madden’s release. Computer-controlled teams are signing too many players at one position, re-signing much of their roster for mega-deals that would break the salary cap, and doing other things that suggest Madden’s new Persona Engine logic is causing some headaches. It’s a tricky thing for me, as I didn’t see them myself, so it can’t color my firsthand experience–and playing in a 32-player league means I’ll be insulated from CPU tomfoolery such as this–but I see these stories and ingest them like headlines of viruses somewhere else in the world. For now, I’m apparently safe, but I’m mindful that such dangers are lurking elsewhere.
Kids would call this next part of my review a vibe shift. While the on-field and Franchise additions are great, if you’re most interested in other modes, you’ll be left wanting. Despite some fun in the custom-avatar career mode, Superstar, it was a frustrating experience overall. I played my career as a free safety, one of the new positions you can take on. But the play-by-play scoring system–a load-bearing pillar of this mode–is routinely faulty. When I’d make a tackle, it would score me as having made a tackle assist. When I’d engage in a block, it would downgrade me for having been pancaked, even as I remained upright. Even weirder, it would get game results wrong. With the Chargers, I beat the Rams to go 6-1, but after the game it said we were 5-2. Then next week, when I lost to the Texans, it gave me a win.
Off the field, Superstar is still a fatigue-inducing affair of menus, corny brand inserts, and false choices. Often, dialogue options let me choose what to say in a text message or to the media, and the difference in outcomes is negligible. This mode also gets to something that is becoming worse in Madden, and probably only going to get even worse once the long-rumored PvPvE social mode, akin to NBA 2K’s The City, finally arrives. Monetization is everywhere, and it’s affecting gameplay.
You can buy levels to improve your avatar faster than playing, but you can also buy a Superstar Pass, which is just a battle-pass-style system that gives you even more skill points for leveling up. Neither precludes you from the other, and in fact EA seems all too happy to let you double-dip, since progression is slow either way, and especially painful if you try to play for free, even if you stick to the single-player story.
You could play Superstar without buying anything extra, but the game really prefers you spend money.
The blowback NBA 2K gets over similar tactics hasn’t really hit Madden yet because its half-measure of a social mode, Superstar Showdown, is largely ignored by the game’s diehard players, whereas in NBA 2K, The City is the point for most players. But if predatory progression slowdowns like this still exist when that mode finally arrives, it’ll be EA willfully stepping on a rake after having surely heard about these issues for years beforehand. At the very least, NBA 2K charges players a lot but delivers a fun game mode. For EA to both ask for so much of your money after the initial $70 (or even $150) and still not offer something enjoyable in exchange is mind-boggling.
All that spending doesn’t even account for the mode-agnostic Team Pass, which is another $10 every few weeks if you want it. Like last year’s game, the Team Pass includes some recycled rewards from the previous Madden, which is frustrating for paid content anyway, but especially bad when it means my Tennessee Titans cosmetics include the team’s outdated branding, since they overhauled their logo and uniforms last winter.
Of course, you can’t talk about overly monetized design without speaking to Ultimate Team, the decades-long undisputed champion of pay-to-win tactics in a fully priced game. For what it’s worth, Ultimate Team (MUT) doesn’t get much focus in Madden 27, which is what many Franchise and Superstar fans always hope for, as they feel it means more resources went to their preferred landing spots instead.
What MUT does add this year is a bit more flexibility in how player cards crystallize, with “Evo” cards allowing you to over-level cards, change their archetypes, and more. To my eyes, this mode is a chore each year that demands you spend your free time playing nothing but MUT. I don’t find that fun or rewarding and probably never will, so long as they keep throwing me into games against credit-card warriors who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to shred people online using the same small handful of glitched plays that emerge every year. Hard pass.
On top of the awesome holiday presentation packages that decorate broadcast-style elements to fit Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, Madden 27’s presentation adds a few other welcome touches. This includes more numerous and detailed alternate field designs that are rolled out to match throwback and alternate jerseys whenever the home team equips them. The weekly recap and halftime shows go deeper than before, adding a Player of the Week segment. It’s all still handled by Scott Hanson, too, who brings authenticity and electricity to each instance.
The holiday broadcasts are a relatively small addition that go a long way toward improving the game.
With all of these new bells and whistles over the past two Maddens, I do wish players in PvP could opt into what the game calls “full” presentation. By default, if you’re playing someone online, the game skips a lot of these awesome displays, like pre-game run-outs and highlights that mimic fading to commercial. These go a long way toward giving the game a more authentic feel, and it’s too bad I rarely get to see them once my review sessions are over and the rest of my games are played in PvP league games.
Presentation is right up there with gameplay and Franchise as the three key pillars that determine whether I enjoy a Madden installment. While the gains here have been smaller than those on the field, in particular, they are still very noticeable, very appreciated, and very cool.
Madden 27 is the fifth consecutive year in which the on-field experience has been foundationally sound and improves on its predecessor. It’s a heartening trajectory for a series I’ve spent my life playing, through both good and bad eras. Despite the still-glaring issues in arenas like Superstar and MUT, Madden feels cool again. It’s past time we stopped applying outdated perspectives to a game that has evolved significantly over the past half-decade. Madden will continue to frustrate at times, patches will sometimes be slow to arrive, and monetization is still way too intrusive and seems likely to get worse. But if you stick to Franchise and take advantage of the many new tools at your disposal on the field, there’s a game worth celebrating here.
Review Verdict
7
GOOD
About GameSpot Reviews
The Good
Yet another leap forward when it comes to offering fun football fundamentals
Lots of new customization options let players take control of both sides of the ball
Franchise's new Persona Engine adds variety and unpredictability to the game's best mode
Presentation touches like holiday games and stadium redesigns go a long way for authenticity
The Bad
Monetization has gotten way out of hand
Superstar mode is still a menu-driven bore, now with bad player scoring and a faulty sim engine
Unsurprisingly, MUT remains a live-service headache
Monday, August 24, 2026
Monday, August 17, 2026
Ohio State Buckeyes 2026 Football Biggest Questions and Dave Portnoy calls Ryan Day "A scared little Chicken-Boy"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)