When comparing Madden NFL 19 vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best PS4 (PlayStation 4) games?” NieR: Automata is ranked 11th while Madden NFL 19 is ranked 198th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro True-to-life gameplay that accurately simulates the NFL
The gameplay in the Madden series excellently plays out just like the professional American football league in real life. You get to play as teams from the current year's league, with rosters that are up-to-date with the latest players, including the biggest celebrity names. The actual NFL rules are in play as well, where you control your quarterback while on offense, passing to other players in order to score, or managing your defensive players when the other team has the ball, working to tackle them and earn turnovers. If you're a diehard fan of American football, then Madden NFL 19 is a great way to live out the experience of being in the NFL through a video game.
Pro Responsive and organic controls for maneuvering your players
The latest update to the long-running Madden series gives you more freedom in how you control your player when he has the ball. You can change your speed while running to throw off opponents, such as hesitating to force the other team to stop while you find an opening and make a run for the touchdown. You can also side step the defense, spin around other players, and pretty much pull off the same types of moves that you see in real life from players out in the field. This makes the game feel like much more of a simulation of the sport with the way you have much more natural control over your team members.
Pro Photorealistic visuals
Madden NFL 19 is a great looking game. Players look true-to-life, with their exact proportions, hairstyles, and girth of their muscles matching how they are in actual pictures. You can see the sheen of sweat on their arms and see the ruffles in their uniform as they get tackled. And the weather is nice too, especially with how snow shows up on the field in patches and uneven patterns just like in real life. Just like with every other new Madden game, the devs did an incredible job with improving the graphics, keeping the technology advancing forward.
Pro Continues the story mode from Madden NFL 18
Madden NFL 18 had a pretty decent story mode that followed the careers of two best friends, with Madden NFL 19 continuing from where the last game left off. It's a nice change of pace to play through a dedicated story mode in a sports game, helping to show the more human side of the league and the types of things that many players go through, in trying to balance their private and family lives with their time out on the field. While it's not exactly a sweeping and intricate narrative, it's an interesting little bonus.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con More or less still the same old Madden
Honestly, if you've played any one Madden game, you've played them all. Aside from a few tweaks and experiments here and there, this is an annual franchise that banks on selling the same experience year after year. The graphics get better, and they keep the roster up to date for the current year the NFL season, but there isn't much else that they can do with a sports game that's meant to simulate professional American football. If you don't want to fork over the money to pay for this game when you've already played and enjoyed other Madden titles, you won't miss out on much.
Con Weird clipping issues
There are some strange instances where players' bodies, or sometimes just their limbs, clip through each other in ways that clearly look bad. It happens a lot during tackles and sacks, with players tumbling around over each other on the field. Their physics just look off, clashing terribly with the polished graphics and weather effects on the field, and pulling you out of the experience.
Con Occasional game crashes
There are some major problems where the game will crash, forcing you to boot everything back up to try and get back your lost progress. The devs should be able to put out a patch that takes care of this issue, so you may want to hold off on getting the game until then.
Con Bland story mode
Even though it's great that Madden NFL 19 continues the well-received story mode from the last game, it doesn't really live up to expectations this time around. Getting to see the two best friends deal with their real-life struggles is still intriguing, but other than that, things feel really forced and generic, and it's way too short, taking about four hours to finish. They continued the story for the sake of continuing it without innovating or keeping things interesting. It's too bad, because they could have done a better job building on the sadly novel idea of having a dedicated story mode in Madden to change things up.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.