Madden NFL Football

The Switch is my perfect console on paper. Switch games can be played from the comfort of a couch on a big screen with a sturdy Pro controller, or they can be played "on the go." In execution - well, it still is the perfect console, but sadly there are still some glaring omissions in its software library. I'd love to have a modern football game on the Switch, but unfortunately EA holds a bit of a monopoly on the digital NFL these days and it's been some years since they've released a Madden on Nintendo hardware. Madden 13 was the last one - released on the Wii U - and before that was the confusingly and simply titled Madden NFL Football on the 3DS.

While it's sometimes casually referred to as "Madden 3D," this is sort of an odd entry in the series. It was the only Madden game released on 3DS and came out as a bit of a stop-gap between Madden 11 and 12. Looking at the game though, there's no doubt that this was basically a port of Madden 11 and I suppose they left the year out of the title so as not to detract would-be buyers at the time from thinking that they should just wait for 12 which would be coming later in the year.

Reviews were middling on this one - and sometimes rightly so. There's no real excuse for the lack of a franchise mode for instance. But I mean still, this is a pretty fun portable football game. It's my only option for such a thing right now, so I feel like a beggar can't be much of a chooser. I've really been embracing portable games lately. And looking at screenshots and Youtube videos, it appears that this certainly is a step-up in pretty much every regard from the various DS entries. So there's that.

I played through a full season and I felt like the core mechanics were fine. The problem is that there's just not the real drama that should come with a season (or franchise). It's like each game is its own self-contained thing. I never saw player injuries - not sure if that changes on higher difficulties than the default. So I don't know. It just felt like I was playing sixteen games that were the same thing each time.

There is this system where during key plays time slows down and you need to do basically a quick time event to be successful. But this was literally just tapping A a bunch of times. It was pretty boring and added nothing to the experience. Even a true QTE that used contextual input could have been more interesting. And this only happened like five times in  my whole season.

While I had fun throughout my nine or so hours with the game, I don't know. The Super Bowl was won and... that was it. Congrats. Nothing more to see here. Move on.

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