Madden NFL 11 review

By BatRastered — August 11, 2010
Tags: football madden-nfl-11 nfl review xbox-360

Should you buy this year's Madden? Do you have last year's? Don't be a Jimmy!

Goukijones already covered the rip-off that is yearly CoD and Madden updates. I haven't bought a Madden game in 5 years though, so I figured I was due.

The presentation is more TV-style this year, which is nice, especially with the addition of my favorite announcer, Gus Johnson. Unfortunately they pair him up with Goukijones's least favorite announcer, Chris Collinsworth. The commentary is good, and the excitement of hearing Gus scream is not quite up to the real thing but still fun, though they do get repetitive from time-to-time.

The new gameflow playcalling system is great, instead of navigating through menus you can just hit "A" and have the coach call a play through your headset (he'll actually talk through your headset if it's plugged in). If you don't like the coach's call you can always audible out of it and you can scout the other teams and set your playbook up accordingly to get better playcalling too.

At the end of a game you can still replay any play, awesome. When you play a replay manually, you even get the epic NFL films orchestral score. (No John Facenda voice over though.)

Throwback? Throw it back! The game includes an AFL mode where you can play as the old AFL teams in the throwback uniforms and the screen has a sepia-toned film-grained look. They even use those NFL films scores again here and make the graphics look different. Unfortunately you're still using today's rosters and the logo on the middle of the field is inexplicably still the modern one. While the film look is cute for a minute it's annoying to play a game like that. Overall this mode is pretty worthless. I remember playing Madden on the SNES and being able to pick epic teams from the past (70's Steelers 80's 49ers, 90's Bills, even an All Time All Madden team if you wanted to pwn). Why can't I have that anymore? For a game that comes out every year, you'd think they'd have the budget. They're too busy putting Gatorade, Old Spice, Doritos, and Verizon ads in the game (I guess that makes it more realistic, no?).

Did I mention the rip-off? Wait, it gets worse. This year, if you want to play online, you have to enter a one-time code printed on the manual. That's right, used copies, which are already pretty worthless in the market due to new games coming every year, are now even more worthless as a user who buys this game second hand will need to pay an additional fee to play online. This is pure bullshit and greed on EA's part and this needs to stop!

Verdict

Well, if you're like me and don't have the last two year's games, this is a great football game. Just make sure you buy it new. Amazon has it with a $20 credit towards a future game. If you have last year's game, this is quite skippable unless you're seriously into the online, in which case you bought this at midnight, so you don't care. Overall the rip-off factor is just too much for me this time: Flush It

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Madden NFL 11 review

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