Review – EA Sports Madden NFL 26 for Nintendo Switch 2

It’s been roughly 15 years since I last played Madden, about the same amount of time since I last played football in real life, actually. I played football for a big chunk of my youth, and even declined an opportunity to play junior college football to focus on my grades. In the years since, I’ve remained fond of football, but haven’t exactly taken the time to keep up with Madden. When I saw the news that Madden was finally coming back to Nintendo systems with Madden NFL 26’s release on the Nintendo Switch 2, I thought that maybe it was time I came back to Madden as well.

Upon booting up the game I found that I had no real memory of how to play Madden. Luckily, Madden NFL 26 has a pretty robust Skills Trainer mode that covers absolutely everything you’d need to know when controlling any of the players on your team, whether they’re on offense, defense, or special teams. There’s a whole section of the skills training marked Beginner that was perfect for someone like me who hasn’t played in over a decade or someone who’s entirely brand new to Madden. There are also a set of advanced drills that cover mechanics new to the Madden franchise that are a little more complicated to understand or pull off. The skills trainer is truly impressive and I learned a lot by spending my first hour or so of Madden NFL 26 just diving in running drills over and over. These drills are quick while staying informative and they give you plenty of opportunity to practice what you’ve learned, though once you start an actual game it can be tough to remember exactly how all of the different mechanics work as you take control of various players.

 

 

Even with a great tutorial, Madden’s got a bit of a learning curve that can only be tackled by playing some games. I figured I could knock the (substantial) rust off by diving into the Franchise mode, which is what I always remember most fondly when I think of my time playing Madden all those years ago. In Franchise, you choose one of the NFL’s 32 teams and essentially become the general manager and the head coach. You’ll guide your chosen team through a season of play in the NFL, getting involved in all of the details of the team’s play and management, from calling plays on the field to going over injury reports, dictating what practices focus on, and so on. To be quite honest it’s all a little overwhelming. It’ll be a huge draw for big Madden fans and stat-heads, but over time I found myself ignoring a lot of things that were thrown at me, instead choosing to automate what I could when prompted, like upgrading my player’s stats or setting a strategy for the week before playing that week’s game.

Jumping into the actual gameplay of Franchise mode, I was pretty quickly frustrated by a few things. I went ahead and chose my dad’s favorite NFL team for my first franchise, the Miami Dolphins. They’re not a great team by any means (they currently have the longest active playoff victory drought in the NFL) but they’ve been getting better in the last few years. I opted to make the Dolphins a new custom head coach for me to play as and dove in. Loading up their first pre-season game I was greeted with one of Madden NFL 26’s new severe rainstorms to play in, and gameplay from that point forward was pretty clunky. The frame rate felt unstable the whole game, and textures for things like goalpost logos and player’s jersey numbers were blurry as if they hadn’t loaded properly at all. There was also pretty bad input lag as I tried to execute plays, making passes very difficult to pull off and kicks for kickoffs, punts, and field goals were very hard to charge correctly as the meter would keep filling well after I let go of the button to stop the charge. Through that whole first game and the two games after it in fairer weather I basically just had to call plays and hope for the best. Any big plays I made felt like luck more than anything, but ultimately I started my season with three losses.

 

 

Luckily once I was no longer playing in terrible weather some of the performance issues subsided, meaning players’ jerseys looked great, as did other logos across the stadiums, though the fans populating the stadiums as well as the exteriors of the stadiums themselves left a lot to be desired. Even the custom coach I made looked awful on the sidelines every time I saw him. I’m not asking for a smoking hot coach (shoutout to Kate Sánchez over at ButWhyTho for having her priorities straight), but I’d like for a custom character I create to at least look like a normal human. Even apart from looking terrible, my coach’s hair had a tendency to bobble in and out of the top of his head like a small boat being tossed about on choppy waters and it never stopped. On the flipside, players on the field look great, for the most part, and I was impressed to see sweat beading on their skill on the Switch 2 — I’m not used to that level of detail from a third-party developed game on a Nintendo console.

I figured at this point it was time to move my gameplay to handheld mode to see how things fared. I played a few more games in handheld and was amazed to find that the weird input lag feeling I’d been having the first couple games had disappeared, though I was still playing terribly. My kicking was leagues better in handheld, but it was still hard to get off passes and players would drop them even when I could get the ball to them, and runs were pretty frequently stopped by lightning fast players I just couldn’t seem to avoid. Overall, I was still frustrated by the experience of playing Madden NFL 26, though I could feel that I was getting more comfortable in the driver’s seat, making better plays and improving my reaction times. I ended up bringing my custom-coached Dolphins to a regular season record of 1-7 before having the thought that maybe the troubles I was having weren’t entirely the fault of my rusty Madden skills.

 

 

I backed out of my Dolphins franchise and decided to load up another team to see if I could fare better. This time around I chose my favorite NFL team and defending Super Bowl champs, the Philadelphia Eagles. I decided not to give them a custom coach, instead sticking with their existing head coach Nick Sirianni, and got to work. The differences between my two Franchise files were immediate and stark. Compared to how the gameplay felt when coaching the Dolphins, coaching the Eagles legitimately felt like I was cheating at the game. My Eagles receivers were grabbing passes and holding onto them, even while covered by two defenders, in a way that my Dolphins receivers never could have dreamed of even when they were completely open. Unless I made a terrible call or was simply outsmarted by a well-executed blitz, my runners were blowing past the defense, making easy first downs and touchdowns like I rarely saw when coaching the Dolphins. They say winning isn’t everything, but I’ve yet to lose a game in my Eagles Franchise and I can tell you that even with some subpar off-field visuals and other quirks, I’m having much more fun this time around.

There are, of course, other weird things about the Switch 2 version of Madden NFL 26 that bothered me while I was playing, like the fact that the UI is slow and stuttery, or that the game announcers and big crowd reactions almost always have a noticeable delay of two to four seconds behind the action not the field. More than once I saw the ball pop out of a runner’s arms, be recovered by either team, and then have a whistle signal the end of the play before the announcers had even begun to comment on the fumble that just took place. It became distracting over the course of several games and unfortunately never got any better. There’s also no crossplay between Madden on Switch 2 and other platforms, which was a major bummer to find out, as I’d been hoping to play some Madden with some other friends in the games industry only to find out they’re all playing on other platforms.

 

 

Even with these faults, the Switch 2 version of Madden NFL 26 does have one major boon over every other platform it’s available on in that it’s completely portable. It’s so easy to pull out your Switch 2 to play a couple drives and then put it to sleep to pick up later. Making it even easier to put down and pick up and play later is the fact that the autosave during games is flawless, just in case you do end up closing the game or your Switch 2 dies. More than once I hurriedly closed Madden to open up another one without thinking about where I was at in a game only to find myself right back in the action when booting up my Franchise later.

Madden NFL 26 has a lot going for it, and I’m glad for the opportunity to revisit the franchise  thanks to it finally landing on a Nintendo system again. I think in a vacuum without any other games on my plate I could get really, really into it. Performance on Switch 2 is iffy and no cross-play is a bummer, but the older I get, the more convenience becomes a factor in my gaming and great portability is hard to beat, and I found it runs better in handheld anyway. The excellent Skills Training mode makes it newcomer-friendly, but it’s not going to hold your hand when you get into real games, which is a good thing. You can just jump right in and play if you’d like, but keep in mind that your games will ultimately be decided by your decision making skills, your ability to control your players, and by the stats and skills of your team and your coaches. If you like winning, then it’s worth the grind to figure out what works best for the way you want to play. If you’re really into the management-sim nature of building a team and executing every little aspect of its construction perfectly, on top of football gameplay, Madden NFL 26 is the game for you.

 

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