Madden NFL 15 has turned out to be one of the better years for improvements to EAs long-running football sim
Are you ready for some football? You should be, because Madden NFL comes out this time every year. It’s not a surprise, folks. What is a pleasant surprise is that Madden
NFL 15 has turned out to be one of the better years for improvements to EA’s long-running football sim. There’s a majorly revamped defensive system that makes defending exciting again, improved play calling, and a system-wide focus on fine-tuning aspects of Madden that have been stationary for far too long. It looks wonderful on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, too.
Controlling the defense has felt like an afterthought in recent years, since your actions as an active defender rarely made an impact on the progression of the play. But Madden 15 focuses on making it fun to play both sides of the ball. The most immediate change you’ll notice is a camera angle positioned behind whichever defender you control. If you’re on the line, you’re asked to time your attack to the center’s snap and fight your way through traffic to take out the quarterback. Favorable matchups allow you to slink past the offense through timely button presses, and once you’ve broken through, you’re given a handy visual indicator to illustrate your tackling range. The safest route is to use the more reserved tackle that almost guarantees an easy sack, but you can also make use of the less accurate hit stick if you’re feeling lucky. This has a greater chance of popping the ball free or even causing a game-changing injury.
When the whistle is blown, Madden serves up the plays called by the offense and defense so you can determine what worked or failed. This information may seem trivial, but it's vitally important to players yearning to understand how to be more successful. It puts powerful information in your hands; if your opponent is calling the same few defensive plays over and over again, you’ll know and can then plot a counter-attack. Opponent strategies are laid bare--just as they are to observant coaches in the real-world NFL--and your success ultimately comes down to your ability to call the right plays and executing them properly.
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Madden 15’s most significant on-field change comes in playing defence. Or, more accurately, making defence playable. Previous years have seen defence coming down to choosing the play and largely letting the dice fall where they may. Now, perhaps inspired by the Seattle Seahawks’ Superbowl-winning Legion of Boom (a ferocious defensive line of 350lb brutes), defence is a lot more fun to play and more easy to influence. It allows you to lock yourself to one player and snap the camera to his back, making it much easier to read the offence and perform your role in the play. There are small touches to get you more involved, a quick button press at the right time to set your linebacker moving at the right speed, and context sensitive actions to shrug off your blocker.
I still want nothing to do with microtransaction-laden Ultimate Team. Connected Careers is still dull in Owner Mode (halfhearted management sim) and filled with unnecessary gimmicks in the rest (don't worry about Confidence, just dump XP direct into player stats and win games). Load screens and game sims are still long (I don't even watch the pre-season; I don't want to play it), though at least the cluttered UI doesn't hitch at every button push in the PS4 version like it does in the PS3 version (makes upgrading players and everything else a nightmare on last gen).
Madden NFL 15 brought to you by the NFL's classist, uncaring, voracious appetite for profit and general moral failure as a multi-billion dollar business built on the backs of broken, mostly forgotten workers? takes its existing defensive framework and makes it not suck. This lets me hit quarterbacks more and release the aggression that wells up when I see any of the in-game advertisements. The rest is Madden 25, but less hideous.
