[ehh]

I played a lot of 17 over the last few weeks so that game is fresh in my mind...

Color me impressed with 18. My wife is out of a town so I had a buddy come over after work and we played 7-8 straight hours of head to head. Visually, it's a bigger improvement than I expected. The lighting, the textures on everything, the uniforms - it's a nice step up from last year. Throwbacks look a million times better.

Frostbite is also more noticeable than I expected. The running game is by far the best it's ever been. Controlling DTs is very different from controlling an LB. One of my first plays against the run I used my DT to discard the guard and thought I had a clear line to the RB for a TFL. I quickly learned of the momentum and weight of Frostbite, took a slightly off-line angle to the RB with the LS and couldn't adjust in time in the RB flew right past me.

Zones are fine for HUM vs HUM, they aren't perfect but we were throwing a lot of interceptions against it and defenders were reacting quickly. Plenty of inaccurate passes as well in some games, other times poor QBs got in the zone and were slingin' it. The new playbooks are very nice.

Of course, I haven't played the CPU nor ventured into CFM so I haven't witnessed any of the warts there yet. But my first impressions are pretty positive, it's more than Madden 17.5 IMO.