Talk about mixed feelings. I picked this up to relive some memories since I can't really stand the direction the series has gone in otherwise. It's a good game. Madden 10 widened the field and slowed down player moment significantly, making the scale of any given play seem much bigger. It was a great change. There are Wildcat plays and far more Spread formations than there were in past Madden titles. This feels rather like the first "modern" title for the NFL, in both the sense that the gameplay feels very next-gen (for the time, anyway) and that the trappings are there to give you a satisfying impression of an NFL sim.
That's the good. Now the bad. Players are still, for reasons that will never make any sense to me, locked hard into their positions. For a game that feels quite modern, this is a huge issue, and one that has persisted in the Madden series for ages. Secondly, the franchise mode is just awful. For one, every draft class is premade, meaning you can get one or two good run-throughs of a franchise mode before you've basically "seen it all." Secondly, and compounding this previous issue, player progression is static, it is tied to a single attribute (potential) and this attribute cannot be changed. This means that no matter how smart you think you are, or how good you are at running a team, your ability to impact your players or the league is significantly limited, because potential is really all that matters.
Ultimately, I'm disappointed with my trip. But I can still appreciate the advances that were made and the degree to which they changed up the game engine to accommodate new modes of play. So, 3/5.
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