The definitive mobile football experience, Madden NFL 23 Mobile Football offers all of the excitement of a console Madden game through a mobile freemium lens. Build up your team over the course of a season and level up your favorite players – if you’re lucky enough to get them.

The Madden franchise has been a mainstay of gaming for years. The first entry in the series, John Madden Football, was released in 1988. Madden, the legendary football personality that the game is named after, insisted that the game stay accurate to the sport to be a realistic educational tool to teach people about the complexities of modern football.

Since the 2000s, a new Madden NFL game has been released once a year like clockwork. Madden NFL 23 Mobile is a spinoff of Madden NFL 2014’s Ultimate Team mode that has been updated every year for the past 9 years. 

If you played Madden NFL 22 Moble previously (or other versions of the game), there’s a good chance that you can carry over a bit of the work you put into your old teams when you’re starting up Madden NFL 23 Mobile. Not a lot of the work, mind you, but each version comes with a “soft reset” that gives new players a chance to catch up while rewarding old Madden players with some extra currency.

Madden NFL 23 Mobile is built around collecting and upgrading players. In order to acquire players, you’ll have to spend in-game currency on packs in the shop. Think of these like baseball card packs – you never know who you’re going to get. Madden NFL Mobile 23 has complex rules about player stats and rarities that ensure that you’ll never get completely ripped off, but it will take a lot of in-game currency if you want to randomly acquire the very best players. Alternately, you can trade a bunch of copies of players of certain rarities and specificity to get the best athletes in the game, but that can take almost as long to pull off.

Like other big-budget freemium games, Madden NFL 23 Mobile is swimming in game modes. Some of these are limited by energy, a resource that replenishes every few real-life minutes, but many of them are repeatable at your convenience. Your journey through the game involves unlocking lots of different play modes and activities, all of which can earn the currencies you need to buy packs and get new players.

If you’re not familiar with modern sports games, you’ll probably be confused by the prevalence of the word “overall.” In this context, “overall” refers to how good a player is. A player who is a “72 overall” is a lot worse than a player who is a “117 overall.” Madden NFL 23 Mobile uses this word a LOT. In fact, if you wanted to summarize the point of the game, you could say that your goal is to make your team’s “overall” as high as possible.

Madden NFL 23 Mobile has a real-time football simulator that’s not dissimilar to the real-time football you play in the console versions of the game. The game’s obsession with player stats and the way you acquire different athletes makes this more of a side attraction than the real thing. Sure, you can use strategy to call plays or show off your timing with cool stiff arms, tackles, or offensive reads, but without the stats to back it up, there’s not much point. No matter how good you are, the team with the higher “overall” usually wins.

The key to success in Madden NFL 23 is to unlock all of the game’s modes as fast as possible. Each new game mode will give you more chances to earn currencies that you can use to get new players and unlock your existing team. At the beginning of your seasonal journey, try to log into the game frequently. Spend your energy quickly on activities to play events and try to avoid capping your energy to progress at a solid pace.

Beyond the basic advice of “log in, do events, receive currency,” be sure to also check out the game’s preferences menu. There are some neat control tweaks that you can make to make the gameplay a lot smoother. Importantly, turning the “advanced action button” on will give you more control over what the “action button” does, enabling you to choose between different moves instead of choosing one automatically. This will give you a LOT more control over the game.

Are you a Madden NFL 23 Mobile fan? Who are the best players to go for right now? What was your luckiest pull? Which players do you think are overrated? Let us know in the comments below!