EA SPORTS Madden NFL 27 Review – Playing It Safe

When the Raiders agreed to trade Maxx Crosby to the Ravens, it sent a shockwave around the NFL. How could one of the elite pass rushers in the game be sent to a legitimate contender for just two first-round picks, and why didn’t my team, the already pass rush-needy Chicago Bears, make that trade instead? So when the Ravens nixed that trade and signed Trey Hendrickson instead, the fan in me wanted to go all in.

In reality, Crosby looks like he’ll remain on the Raiders for the foreseeable future, but in Madden NFL 27, I quickly made that thought a reality, sending a similar package to bring the elite edge rusher to the Bears and fulfilling my real-life wishes for the team at the very start of a new franchise save.

Madden NFL 27 feels a lot like those new-look Bears. They were already pretty good, finishing last season with a good record and some great highlights but ultimately falling short of Super Bowl glory and failing to take that true next step. With a shiny new edge rusher to complement the ascent of their cover-gracing quarterback Caleb Williams, they make a big upgrade in a spot with a clear need to undoubtedly make the team better, but it risks overshadowing some of the smaller needs across the rest of the team and creates some financial frustration with the huge salary cap hit that Maxx Crosby would take that stop the team from being as good as possible across all three phases.

With Madden 27, EA has made a flashy upgrade to one of its three main modes, overhauling the Franchise mode in a way that undeniably upgrades the experience with a fresh new look and a revamped balance between on-field and off-field priorities. That makes an already good experience better, but it’s not to say that the new-look Franchise makes up for some of the existing deficiencies under the hood, and there’s a glaring financial issue that threatens the whole package altogether.

" In reality, Crosby looks like he’ll remain on the Raiders for the foreseeable future, but in Madden NFL 27, I quickly made that thought a reality"

The most noticeable changes in Madden 27 are superficial. I first want to acknowledge the soundtrack, which for the first time I can remember, aims not to just have a playlist of enjoyable songs to listen to over and over again, but to pretty closely mirror the types of songs you would hear at an actual football game. With everything from “Mr. Brightside” and “Levels” to “Crazy Train” and “Kickstart My Heart,” it feels legitimately like a collection of songs that reflect the football experience, and most of those songs are classics to boot.

Elsewhere, Franchise mode has evolved from having a longlist of the same weekly activities to providing a more directed sequence of high-priority activities that are most pressing that week. Whereas the past version showed you more or less the same checklist every week, tasking you with sifting through menu after menu to find what you should be focusing on, this new version streamlines the experience, showing you no more than a dozen or so tasks that you should complete every week in big, easy to understand tiles. While there aren’t any entirely new activities to complete on a weekly basis, you’re able to get just as much done with less time wasted, and it ultimately encourages you to spend more time off the field because that time is spent much more productively.

In the past, having to check every week if I had new contracts to negotiate or players to keep happy made it feel overwhelming and increased how much I let the computer take over, and while it’s still possible to go as deep into the details as you’d like or, alternatively, delegate tasks with a single button press, the off-field tasks feel less like a chore this time around because it takes so much less time to navigate there.

Going hand-in-hand with the greater encouragement to negotiate or speak with players directly is the new Persona system for each player, which brings more structure to how players react in any given situation. Each player is assigned a handful of traits that characterize their mindset, closely mirroring how players are perceived in real life. Top quarterbacks like Josh Allen or Caleb Williams, for example, are often confident and reliable, while role players are typically team-first and opportunistic. These traits guide you in how you treat that player.

If you’re negotiating a contract with someone who’s direct and contract-minded, they probably aren’t going to respond well to a pitch that asks for a playoff discount; on the other hand, some players who are team-first might not need a longer contract or more guaranteed money to come to a deal. As morale oscillates and you speak with players one-on-one, you’ll also use these traits to dictate how you help them, which can often have a direct impact on how interested they are in staying with the team long-term.

"The most noticeable changes in Madden 27 are superficial."

These off-field changes are a nice counterbalance to the on-field gameplay, which, for another year, feels largely similar to last year but brings forward changes seen in EA’s College Football 27 and introduces a few new tweaks on its own. The biggest of these is a new catch meter that puts you more in control of your receiver’s catch timing, as long as the ball isn’t swatted away. If you land in the green, you’re almost guaranteed to make the catch, but the further into the yellow and red zones you land, the higher your chances of a drop.

I like this meter because it finally gives you more to do as a receiver, but because it’s impossible to have a timing meter like that on quick passes like slants or digs, it gets relegated to being used mainly on deep passes and becoming more of something that helps me on a Hail Mary than on an important 3rd down. Receivers and defensive backs also have more dynamic moves at the line of scrimmage, meaning you can now opt for a quick step or juke on the snap as a receiver or quickly adjust your leverage as a defender.

As a DB, this complements the improvements to pre-snap adjustments that were first introduced in CFB 27 that allow you to create your own custom adjustments and have more options as you read the offense, particularly with changes to the secondary that allow you to give more tangible instructions on how defensive backs should line up before the snap and react when a play breaks down.

What’s also carried over from CFB 27 is the inclusion in the Superstar player creator mode of three new positions: Tight End, Edge Rusher, and Free Safety. As a tight end, you have goals for both receiving and blocking, and while it definitely resembles the wide receiver path, especially when your training often includes the same drills a receiver would do, it’s much more about reading the defense and being able to either block the right person or find a soft spot in a zone defense.

There’s not quite as much differentiation on the defensive side of the ball, which is why playing as an edge rusher or a free safety feels like playing different aspects of the middle linebacker path that already existed, though I certainly appreciated the opportunity to try and one-up Myles Garrett and set the single-season sack record yet again.

Within Superstar mode, though, lies the more sinister aspect of Madden 27: its microtransactions. Microtransactions aren’t new for EA or Madden, which continues to reset your Ultimate Team each year, this year in a package that feels more or less identical to last year. What’s new, at least since EA backtracked on its attempt to do this in the college game, is the single-player microtransactions. As your character levels up, you gain new skill points that can be marked to your physical and mental traits and are the main way you increase your overall level, meant to mirror how a real player grows and improves over their career.

Totally understandable, except for the fact that you can also purchase your XP with real money to immediately get those points and become a superstar. Oh, and you can also purchase a separate Premium Pass that gives you access to twice the skill points and rewards. You can, of course, play games and complete weekly training to gain experience at no cost, but with no XP slider, there’s an omnipresent feeling that EA is purposefully slowing down progress with the direct goal of getting players to spend more money in a single player game they already own. You would think that after the College Football debacle just months earlier, EA might try to rein in the microtransactions, but instead it feels like they are planning to shoehorn these into as many game modes as possible.

"Within Superstar mode, though, lies the more sinister aspect of Madden 27: its microtransactions."

Like that Maxx Crosby trade, Madden NFL 27 is flashy. Unfortunately, in the first year after that trade, my Bears missed the playoffs, and then we entered salary cap hell that caused me to lose some great players and soft rebuild. Likewise, Madden 27 provides a clear, flashy upgrade to the Franchise mode both in how it looks and feels to play, particularly because of how much more enticing it is to handle off-the-field activities.

Outside of that, though, the rest of the package hasn’t moved much aside from some on-field tweaks and some new positions in Superstar, which is now inundated with single-player microtransactions. Madden tries to do something big this year, and though parts of it certainly improve, I can say from experience now that the flashiest move doesn’t always make the whole thing better.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.