This review is coming in rather late to the party, but as far as I can tell this party appears to be an angry mob storming the review boards of Madden NFL 23. When I first saw this on the Steam page, where the game had mostly negative reviews, I questioned if they were review bombing it for some strange reason or if the game was actually terrible. So, I booted up the game, and instantly, I realized that all of the negative reviews were legit.

In fact, as far as I can tell, most of the nice reviews that I have seen of the game are either mocking it or just game reviewers trying to throw a little pity party for EA while trying to hide the vomit in their mouths. That might be a bit harsh, but let me get into the details of why I found Madden NFL 23 to be terrible.

Let’s start off with the tutorial. At least, that’s what I assume this was. Before the game even allows you to see the main menu, you are thrown into a match where it is Coach Madden vs Coach Madden. If that concept isn’t off-putting enough, the character model that they made for him won’t make you like this anymore. I can only applaud this tutorial in one way, which is that it allows you to explore various scenarios that you might get into in rapid succession.

The only problem with this is that they don’t really teach you how to do most things: switching player control, navigating the play menu, and many other things are just kind of left for you to fumble around with. The developers might have thought that everyone who is playing this year’s release played Madden NFL 22, but I did not. In fact, the last football game that I owned was NCAA Football 2005 for the original Xbox.

Luckily for me, I found a way to skip the tutorial so that I could jump right into a regular game. Where I was greeted by Coach Madden on the main menu and saw that there were quite a few game modes to choose from. Nonetheless, I decided to do a custom game since that is typically the bread and butter of titles like these.

Within about three plays, I ran into my first glitch where a player phased through the walls of the stadium while celebrating a touchdown. From then on, the state of the game that people had been talking about began to truly shine through. It was not good. Everything from player models, to objects that were transparent but shouldn’t have been, to strange controller glitches.

Now I should pause to acknowledge the overall problem with Madden NFL 23, but it is a general problem with these yearly sports games. That is the fact that this year’s release (like the others) was developed in under a year. So there is no reason why anyone should be blaming the developers for this disaster. Instead, Madden NFL 23 points to the problem within the publisher mindset of EA, which continues to throw out these sports games in the hopes of getting players to buy the game purely based on the fact that it is a licensed sports title.

Since I have been out of the sports games market for a long time, I decided to compare the scores that the Madden NFL franchise has compared to its four previous installments on Metacritic. From what I can tell, the general scores by players of the series have been significantly negative for the last four games. Hired reviewers have given the last four games quite a bit of slack, but they are starting to finally see that the games are going downhill.

That is pretty much all I have to say about Madden NFL 23. There are a few other game modes beyond the basic one, but they are all the stereotypical modes that you can play in previous Madden NFL games. Overall, I would only recommend buying this year’s release if you haven’t played a football video game in a bit and you see it on sale.

Beyond that, I would suggest that you just boot up your copy from a previous year and hold onto your cash. At least until the NFL decides to give the rights to make their games to a worthy publisher who will not force a developer to come up with something terrible for the sake of a deadline. In the meantime, I will be dusting off my original Xbox and copy of NCAA Football 2005.

A PC review copy of Madden NFL 23 was provided by EA Sports for this review.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Madden NFL 23

$59.99

4.5

Score

4.5/10

Pros

• Updated Player List
• Easy to Access Gamemodes

Cons

• Terrible AI
• Wonky Character & Ball Movements
• No Next Gen Features Brought to PC
• Too Easy
• Strange Tutorial