The Madden curse is lifted.
No, not that one–the one I alluded to at the end of my review last year. I’d said it felt like I was cursed to play a frustrating football game year after year forever, because I liked it enough to invest my time (if only for my job and my online league), but I never felt like it was living up to its responsibility as the only NFL sim available on the market. Madden NFL 26 finally gives me hope. Supplementing the great on-field gameplay with a Franchise overhaul that turns Madden into a sports RPG in the way it should be, this is the best Madden in a long time.
Sunday Spectacle
Madden’s on-field gameplay has been improving year over year for a good while now. It’s not that it can’t improve any more, but it’s finally in that stage, like some other sports games have reached before, where the foundation is sturdy and, with the most important aspects in a good place, the development team is now focusing on enhancements more than fixes.
This year brings welcome new touches, including something Electronic Arts calls QB DNA, allowing quarterbacks to play more like their real-life counterparts. Someone like Anthony Richardson is more antsy and will tuck the ball and run with it sooner, while someone like Josh Allen may take off as he’s prone to do, but he’ll also scramble out of the pocket, keeping his eyes downfield while looking to make magic happen. Shorter QBs like Kyler Murray also have to contend with their vertical disadvantage, and you’ll see passes whacking the helmets of offensive linemen sometimes.
Across the league, Madden’s QBs mimic real players better than ever, and to my surprise, this concept extends to wide receivers, too. I’ve seen a lot of WRs go to the ground rather than lower their shoulder and take on a would-be tackler. Other times, they’ve purposely darted out of bounds after a catch-and-run, saving their physical health just like wideouts and other ball carriers sometimes do in reality. Last year’s “Boom Tech” tackle animations have been improved too, with the awkward broken tackles and funky physics-defying moves being wiped away.
A small football-nerd touch that I love is the addition of run fits baked into the on-field play art before the snap. It used to be that you’d see your defender’s pass assignment or blitz art. Now, when you view the pre-play art, you’ll see both his pass assignment and his gap assignment, should the play be a run. As someone who has historically overprotected the pass and is liable to get burned on the ground, this added detail provides me with more useful information on every defensive snap in the game. It’s such a small thing, but it illustrates where we’re at with Madden on the field in Summer 2025: victory laps in the form of nice-to-have features, after years of delivering the non-negotiable stuff.
A sign the developers are listening, and not stuck on earlier notions of how to design Madden, is what they’ve done to locomotion. Last year, EA’s College Football was lightning-fast, which made controlling players in the much more sluggish Madden feel like turning an ocean liner. This year, the games share a single locomotion system, which isn’t quite as fast as College Football 25, but is still much faster and more enjoyable than Madden 25. This marks a departure from how Madden developers thought the game should feel just a few years ago. The slowdown was intentional, but after fans clearly showed their preference for College Football’s movement system, the Madden team pivoted quickly, and this year’s game unshackles the pro athletes from their lead boots.
That’s not to say the game is without on-field issues, however. The new coaching suggestions system is meant to be enhanced by machine learning trained on real-life coaching data, but in reality, it’s as faulty as every other generative AI chatbot I’ve seen in action, offering overly confident suggestions at inopportune moments. A noticeable CPU playcalling difference this year is that the CPU loves to run QB sneak on third and one, but the AI coaches don’t seem to understand this. I’ve seen them regularly suggest plays to me that would surely give up the first down if I ran them, especially because QB sneak continues to be very hard to stop without a specific defensive scheme aided by several pre-snap adjustments entered like the Konami Code.
The AI coach is quite goofy at times, because even when the words they use to justify their playcalls read as confident, their numerical confidence rating attached to those words is sometimes hilariously low. “Run this play, I have 7% confidence in it,” they’d tell me (paraphrasing). I think my kids, who don’t even watch football, could match that figure, so what are you doing here, AI Dan Campbell?
Winter is coming
Visually, the series has rarely been lacking across its long history, but this year’s game has a sheen to it that gives it a bigger leap forward than the usual year-to-year differences. Lighting looks fantastic, jersey mesh moves more realistically, and best of all is the new severe weather, like Game of Thrones-style snowstorms that obstruct your view after about 20 yards down the field. It’s incredibly immersive and can even be quite intimidating. When you’re in a hard rain or snow game, there’s no getting around it; it’s going to get messy, but in the way football is meant to get.
Presentation may be more important to me than most Madden players. Strong presentation features, like those in MLB The Show and NBA 2K, have made me envious for years, as a football fan first and foremost. Finally, Madden seems to be catching up to those sports-sim leaders in this regard. Smarter camera choices, aided by stronger commentary and electric pre-game runouts, make each game feel more like the on-TV product. Last year’s addition of new broadcast teams goes much deeper this year with the four total gameday presentation packages. There’s the default “Sunday afternoon” scorebug, theme song, and highlight animations, but then there are three more packages emulating Thursday, Sunday, and Monday Night Football, respectively. Primetime games now have that big-game feel they ought to have.
There’s still room to enhance and build on these new features, and even though Madden is a series that has touted “new presentation” almost annually for decades now, this is the first time where I can say they really got it right. It feels like the Madden team inside EA Orlando took some cues from the College Football team. The collegiate sport is not the only brand of football that should honor traditions, and Madden finally figured that out, as evidenced by local in-stadium traditions like the Patriots’ ringing of the bell or the blowing of the Gjallarhorn before Vikings games. I’m still waiting for “Crazy Train” to play over the opening kickoff at Gillette Stadium, but I’ll forgive that as a complicated music-rights issue for now and hope I can hear Pats games achieve full authenticity soon.
Halftime shows and weekly recaps in Franchise also slickly pull highlights from games around the league, even creating them on the spot if they’re from a CPU-versus-CPU game. Just as cool, however, is seeing highlights from other players in a shared online Franchise. It gives the mode a sense of community and ecosystem it has sorely lacked.
RPG: Role-playing gridiron
In fact, as strong as most of what I’ve said until now may seem, the biggest reason I find Madden 26 to be so good is the Franchise overhaul. I was extremely skeptical when I saw all that was being promised for my favorite mode this year, but EA actually pulled it off. Compared to last year’s comically poor storyline segments, it’s truly night and day what EA Tiburon has done to Franchise. In essence, it’s the sports RPG Madden always should’ve been. Past touches like coaching skill trees suggested the developers understood this desire existed among players, but not until now has it felt realized. Those skill trees are much deeper and wider, touching more parts of the game, with smarter progression and more desirable, impactful rewards.
Rather than spending a few weeks’ worth of points to unlock something like +1 Strength to all interior linemen, now you’ll unlock skills that more greatly affect your players, like +4 Strength to those same players, and the in-game scouting report on opponents gives you more information on your opponent so you can prepare accordingly with the right abilities. You can also buff your draft scouts and your training staff with helpful new abilities.
Because injuries are less rigid now, designed around windows of recovery versus exact weeks, you can build your training staff to avoid injuries in practice, reduce injury time when they do occur, or get your “Questionable” players to “Probable” for gameday. For all of the game’s many abilities, you’re even able to upgrade them several times over, further improving the buffs. Unlocking abilities is done in ways that make sense, like unlocking new rushing game “Playsheets,” or temporary extensions of your week-to-week playbook, by having several great games on the ground.
At the same time, you have to manage your loadouts of these skills. So if you want, for example, a scouting ability to take effect, you have to lock it into your coach’s loadout for many in-game months, thus taking up a skill slot virtually all season long, to reflect how real-life scouting is a marathon, not a sprint. Inventive RPG-like “build” considerations like this are all over the new coaching skill trees, making it more fun than ever to create a custom coach and carve your path through the league. I should mention that sometimes the abilities behave differently than I’d expect, leading me to believe they will be the subject of future patch notes, like one that unlocks new training slots for your players, but not until the following week, wasting a loadout slot for a short while.
College Football 25’s Wear and Tear system arrives in Madden this year, too, offering a more nuanced health and stamina system that tracks both the severity and quantity of hits you take in any given game. This means you have to use your players more thoughtfully–you can’t just feed the tight end short outs forever if he’s taking hits after each catch. They’re going to add up, and he’ll suffer attribute losses later in the game. This system doesn’t yet use the career-long view that came to EA’s other football series this summer, but it’s a welcome start that feeds back into Franchise by bringing with it player-by-player practice plans, improving on the old position-level plans. Nuance is ubiquitous in Madden 26 Franchise mode, and it’s always welcome.
The RNG element of applying skill points to players is now more closely tied to their archetype. It was always maddening (no pun intended) when I’d feed points into my bruiser running back and get elusive-coded buffs, or I’d specifically target a kicker’s power, only to improve his accuracy instead in the semi-randomized skill point dispersal. Thankfully, these discrepancies are fewer and farther between in Madden 26.
Top-heavy roster
While Franchise is finally shaping up to be the game’s destination mode it always should’ve been, Superstar takes a smaller step forward. The mode now centers on building relationships on and off the field with everyone in your life, from the linemen blocking for you on Sundays to your agent, the fans, your coach, and even characters like a dance instructor who unlocks new emotes for you to use after touchdowns. There’s a stylist you can work with who rewards you with cosmetic items the more you collaborate with them, but others, like the tattoo artist, have hardly any rewards at all, making the weekly zero-sum choices you have to make sometimes pointless. Why would I dedicate my time to leveling the tattoo artist over, say, the coach or my agent, when the artist has nearly no unlockables at all, and none of interest?
Sadly, all of these characters (other than your coaching staff and teammates) are expressed using ugly gen AI images that give the mode an unavoidable post-Musk Twitter aesthetic. Oddly, the “Hacker” character you meet, who unlocks skill respecs for your custom avatar, has a cartoonish look that doesn’t at all match the rest of the mode’s social circle mechanic, Sphere of Influence. It feels sloppily put together. The avatar customization tools aren’t much better. My player ended up with intensely sculpted eyebrows because I didn’t see any place to even choose his eyebrows. They seemed to be a package deal with the head’s general look.
Outside of those eyesores, the mode is better than in years past, with a deep rewards tree and a character-leveling system that does just enough to get me to chase its upgrades for a while. After one season as the Giants’ running back, I was traded to the Chargers and started to light it up behind their vaunted offensive line. Those NFL games were fun for a while, but it’s not a mode I care to play for a long time. After a season or so, you’ve seen all there is to see, and playing beyond that only really matters if you want to get your player to 99 OVR, or if you just want to tighten up his attributes for the online modes.
Of course, EA really wants players to take their avatar into Superstar Showdown, the live-events social mode, more than the siloed single-player experience, anyway. In Madden 26, that mode remains a garish fraction of what NBA 2K’s The City offers. It seems to me that EA will soon roll out a fully fledged open-world mode akin to NBA 2K’s popular landing spot, but for now, players are clearly stuck in the in-between era. It’s better than Superstar of the past few years, which sometimes imprisoned players in a drab, lonesome bedroom after every game with nothing of note to do. However, the social game modes available in Superstar Showdown still feel like only a sliver of what 2K is doing, and it’s well past time for that gap to close.
The cosmetics in this mode are so overly flashy and lurid that I would feel embarrassed to wear them, especially if I then got Moss’d in them. I’m someone who is happy to spend money on cosmetics, and I love football, so I should be in the Venn diagram of players EA can successfully shake down for some microtransactions, but I would never wear the things the developer is selling in the shop, especially at the prices they sell them for.
Ultimate Team (MUT) is often either the bane of Madden players’ existence or the mode they can’t stop playing. Few players seem to exist in between, and I’ve softened a bit on MUT over recent years. As a solo experience, I don’t mind playing it for free for a while. I do force myself to not spend a dime on the mode, which reveals to me how often the game really wants me to spend many, many dimes on it. MUT remains a frustrating pay-to-win experience if you play it in multiplayer, but at least if the fantasy aspect is more appealing to you than a team- or player-driven mode, this year’s quality-of-life changes, like quicker access to your list of challenges and a streamlined user interface, are small but welcome. The menus are still too slow to avoid some frustrations, though, and this is a Madden problem going back what feels like forever.
I can’t recommend anyone play this mode online, where the game seems hellbent on pitting you against the community’s credit card warriors–not to mention the aggravation that can come with playing strangers in sports games anyway–but if you keep to yourself, EA does a great job of constantly offering more things for you to do than virtually anyone could possibly keep up with.
Madden NFL 26 takes a bigger leap forward than you may expect. On the field, Madden has rounded into shape and is now taking victory laps with its major and minor changes, like more exciting locomotion and lifelike player traits. Its presentation beats finally behave more like the NFL seen on TV every week, with intense weather and big-game showdowns in primetime demanding your attention. Franchise mode’s RPG-like deep dive makes it feel like the destination mode it should be, and year-over-year, it represents the most dramatic improvement I can recall in the series’ history. Superstar mode still feels like a work-in-progress, and MUT shows no signs of ditching its pay-to-win scheme, but for players like me, who are Franchise-focused and on-field-obsessive, Madden NFL 26 is the game you’ve been hoping for.
