I should state upfront that I am a Madden Guy, but I only buy it every other year, unless there is something really revolutionary. So I am judging 2008 after playing 2006 for the past two years. With that in mind, I am pretty disappointed overall.
Don't get me wrong there are some great things about the games that I love. I love precision passing, the hit stick, the audibles and line adjustments, even the alternative jerseys, but all of that was available in 2006. My biggest issue with 2008 is that there is very little new. They added some new tackling animations, which are really cool, the roster update which is expected, and a pretty interesting training process, but the took away some things that I liked. First of which is Tony Bruno. You may be asking yourself WTF?!? Who the hell is Tony Bruno. This is the guy who did the "radio show" in between games. It was nice to hear discussion about what was going on each week while trolling through the menus.
They did add a great deal of texture to the game, making it look really good, but this causes the game to preform pretty badly, it is slow, sometimes herky jerky and don't even try to pull up the national or local paper. You will need to wait quite a while for those articles to load, even when you are just switching between them.
This brings me to my final point, there are to many things in the game that are EXACTLY THE SAME in this version when compared to 2006. Finish a training camp drill, here there is the same cheesy cut scene. Win a game, you will see your QB, TE and RB with there silly poses. The news articles are the same... SAME SAME SAME.
Look EA does a great job with Madden, and If i was on a next gen console I may have a different experience, but at this point I am just not as impressed as I have been in the past. Don't get me wrong, I will be playing Madden pretty much non stop for a while, I just wish I was playing something better.
Overall, i am going to give Madden a punt for this year. Hopefully Madden 2010 will be different.
