Now that I have the game in hand, and I’m not going off the demo, it’s clear the infinity engine isn’t based on real movement or real physics at all. As just one example, when a player whose casually walking by a downed player trips they launch into a rolling flip that would have required massive momentum and a jump to achieve.

This isn’t the Euphoria engine (from BackBreaker), or real physics tackling in play. They added 40 points of contact for animations to trigger, and it’s a very early / buggy release.

Why EA Sports won’t just license Euphoria like RockStar and many other companies have done for their games is simply mind boggling. EA Sports have been trying for years to get Movement/Locomotion right in Madden only to fail year after year, and now they’ve added a tackling engine on top of their faulty locomotion/movement engine stacking one problem on top of another.

Arcade gamers will enjoy Madden, and Maddenintes will enjoy it (they don’t know any better), but gamers looking for a real simulation experience will continued to be disappointed in the gameplay. The pass and catch anytime mechanics are still in, slants are easy money, pass action is all but broken, route based passing still doesn’t exist, zone coverage is horribly broken, QB spy doesn’t work properly, and the list goes on… *sigh*

New broadcast engine is a good, as is the new franchise mode (connected careers). Hopefully they continue to build upon it instead of throwing it away every other year. Only downside is there’s still no halftime show or weekly update that many gamers have requested for half a decade.