College Football 25 Review in Progress [IGN]

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first: College Football 25’s presentation is light-years beyond what developer EA Orlando has been doing with Madden. You can see sweat on individual players, the lighting is exceptional, and everything pops visually in a way that Madden just doesn’t. There’s also just a lot more stuff to enjoy, from the unique intros for each team as they take the field to mascots dancing around when their school pulls off a big play. There’s even performances from cheerleaders, school-specific cheers, and live cuts to the crowd reacting to what’s happening in real time. College Football 25 captures a lot of the pageantry and tradition that makes college football unique, and that makes it feel unique, too. I hope some of this added focus on presentation will make it over to Madden in the next few years.

The other major difference is that it just feels faster and a whole lot more fluid. Plays happen more quickly, there’s less delay between them, and players feel like they’re moving more nimbly, too. When real-life players make the transition from college to the NFL, you’ll often hear them talk about having to adapt to the faster speed of the NFL game – here, though, it’s the other way around, and it makes College Football 25 feel dynamic in a way that Madden doesn’t.

There are also a lot of nice little touches throughout. I like how selecting your favorite team (which you do by choosing their helmet, not a name from a list) decorates the main menu with photos of their mascot, stadium, and other cool, team-specific things like ticket stubs, or how the loading screens and on-field play art looks like they’ve been drawn by hand. College Football 25 has personality. Oh, and unlike Madden 24, there’s no menu lag. It’s the little things.

As far as modes go, though, things are a little barebones. You’ve got your standard Play Now feature for jumping into a quick game; Road to the College Football playoffs, which is an online ranked mode where you’ll pick a team and try to guide them to a National Championship; Road to Glory, which lets you create your own player and pilot them through their college career; Dynasty, where you’ll helm one of College Football 25’s 134 (!) teams as either a head coach or an offensive or defensive coordinator; Practice and Mini-Games modes; and finally, College Ultimate Team (CUT), the college version of Madden Ultimate Team, which is still a slot machine masquerading as a trading card game that will almost assuredly make EA hundreds of millions of dollars and eventually earn the ire of the player base as it gets more updates on a yearly basis than every other mode combined. Cynical? Maybe, but we’ve seen this movie before.

EA’s servers have been something of a mess since launch, so I haven’t really gotten to play much Dynasty yet – whenever I try to make a Dynasty league, it always fails to download the latest rosters from EA’s servers or sign my coach’s contract) – but I have messed around with the other modes, and so far, I’m pretty whelmed. I’ve spent the most time in Road to Glory, so let’s start there.

Disappointingly, there are no high school games to play in Road to Glory as there were in NCAA Football 14. Instead, you spawn your player from the ether, choose a position (you can play as a QB, HB, WR, MLB, or CB), and determine whether you want to start as a 5-star, 4-star, 3-star, or 2-star recruit. The better you are as a prospect, the sooner you’ll see the field, and the better you’ll play when you do, but starting off as a less desirable recruit is more challenging, and ultimately, more rewarding if you manage to make it to a starting position. (After all, everyone loves an underdog story.) I started as a 5-star QB named Joe Throw who got picked up by 5-star Michigan because I already work hard enough at my day job, thank you very much, and it’s been… not great.

Each week, you’ll allocate Rest Points to stats like Academics, Health, Training, Leadership, Brand, and so on. You only have so many, and sometimes you’ll get a text from a sponsor offering you an endorsement deal or from your academic advisor offering some extra study time, which will take up a good chunk of your weekly allotment. Spending points the right way is important because you have to maintain a certain GPA and don’t want to be so tired you open yourself up to injury. So far, however, it’s pretty basic resource management and the lack of any cutscenes means you’re mostly just navigating menus. Think of a somehow more barebones version of Madden’s already barebones Superstar mode, and you’re on the right track.

What’s really frustrating, though, is the on-field Road to Glory experience. As a quarterback, you’re only given one play call option each down, and you’’ll have to run that play unless you spend limited Play Change points to unlock two other choices. Earn more of your coach’s trust by playing well and spend your Rest Points wisely throughout the week, and you’ll get more plays to choose from. Makes sense, right? The issue is that even with maximum trust, you seemingly can’t audible, so if the plays you are given look like a bad fit against what the defense is showing you, there’s nothing you can do besides hot route your receivers on passing plays and hope it works out. On running plays? You’re out of luck, Jack.

And even if you spent the Play Change points, you’re still limited in what you can call, and sometimes it barely makes a difference anyway. If you don’t want a running play and spend a Play Change point, there’s no guarantee you won’t get two more running plays. Spending a point and getting what are essentially two more versions of the same play feels bad because you don’t earn more points as a game goes on. I get that this restriction is meant to simulate building your coach’s trust, and that’s all well and good, but at least let me have one or two pre-approved audibles. Give me something. Don’t get me wrong: Michigan is, as of now, undefeated; Joe Throw is almighty. But I’m not having that much fun winning.

College Ultimate Team is… Ultimate Team. The Challenges you have to do to progress are boring, and it’s designed to take annoyingly long so that even decent players start to think opening their wallets isn’t a bad idea. College Football 25’s real sin, however, is locking all of the tutorial content inside Ultimate Team. Madden’s excellent Skills Trainer, which will walk you through everything from basic gameplay to identifying and beating certain defensive coverages? Not here. Instead, it’s been replaced with Ultimate Team Challenges, and the change is as bad as it sounds. One early one put me inside the red zone and tasked me with throwing a lob pass. You know, the kind you throw on deep balls after your receiver beats their corner and is running free down the field. And because it’s Ultimate Team and not the Skills Trainer, you have to choose the right play from your playbook, and make the pass in a single try. Otherwise, you’re staring at the “Challenge Failed” message over and over and over again. Remember, this is meant to be a tutorial.

It’s hard not to be deeply cynical about this design choice. Surely EA Orlando could have taken the Skills Trainer, which has existed in Madden for several years, and put another version of it into College Football 25. The only reason to do it this way is to encourage new players to go into CUT – of course, they’d have to realize that the tutorials are in CUT in the first place, which is something College Football 25 doesn’t advertise at all. As someone who doesn’t play Ultimate Team beyond the review period for obvious reasons, I just assumed that there were no tutorials at all and EA simply wanted college football-loving folk who don’t regularly play Madden to suffer. In actuality, however, they want them to get hooked on CUT and spend lots and lots of money. I’m not sure which is worse.

And then there are things that just don’t make sense. Every CPU team I’ve played so far loves to run a no-huddle offense, but College Football 25 does not simulate the time between plays unless you turn on the accelerated clock option in the menus. Teams otherwise come to the line instantaneously, which, aside from being annoying and making everyone on your defense very tired very quickly, means games last far longer than they should. The mini-games, which are generally more fun and varied than Madden’s (though some, like WR Battle, are one-to-one recreations), have a scoring system so strict they are impossible to get gold medals on unless you play perfectly. Bafflingly, there’s also no option to restart a mini-game if you finish it and don’t like your score, as there is in Madden, so I’ve found myself picking easy ones like Option Attack and just running them over and over again to spend as little time with them as possible. If you want to restart a mini-game to try and hit a higher score after you’ve completed it, you have to close and reopen the entire game.

And while College Football 25’s visuals are generally wonderful, the UI is, to put it kindly, atrocious. Madden has an automated hat count, which will show you how many defenders are lined up in both sides of the box on running plays and whether or not you have an advantage in blockers on either side. It’s not there in College Football, so you’d better know how to do that yourself. (I hope you like playing the CUT tutorials!) The “previous play” arts showing you the last play the offense and defense ran are hidden unless you flick the right stick to bring up that menu, which isn’t immediately obvious. It’s hard to see how much stamina defensive linemen have because, unlike the bar used in Madden, stamina in College Football 25 is represented by small blue circles over their heads that are hard to see, especially if you’re zoomed out. There are no on-screen notifications telling you what type of pass you just threw, whether you landed a hit stick, whether that pick you just got was perfectly timed, or anything else.

God help you if you’d like to actually see what abilities your players have mid-match because the icons were made for ants. And while play arts look great on the field, the ones in your playbook are a step down from what recent Maddens have offered. Oh, and then there’s the genuinely embarrassing things, like certain schools having outdated logos – EA has publicly admitted to Stanford, Western Michigan, and Jacksonville State already – and certain player likenesses being inaccurate. I understand that College Football 25 is a massive undertaking, and EA hasn’t made a game like this in a long time, but the whole thing feels rushed, incomplete, and in a lot of ways, not up to par with Madden, much less the other sports games that Madden already wasn’t up to par with, which is basically all of them.

I still find myself thinking a lot about that guy I overheard at my friend’s wedding, a person who is buying a $500 console just to play this game. I wonder if he, as someone who doesn’t play a lot of video games, is having fun – because despite the NCAA’s wider appeal, so far it feels like anyone who doesn’t already know how to play EA’s football games is going to have a really bad time with College Football 25. Even as someone who plays way too much Madden, the stuff that’s not here is both baffling and infuriating. It’s barebones, sports poor UI design, has tutorials that range from “bad” to “non-existent,” and features a number of other frustrations that simply shouldn’t be here. Oh, and I really don’t appreciate seeing an Ultimate Team pop-up every time I exit every other game mode. I know it’s there, EA. We all do. I just don’t want to play it.

Maybe Dynasty will change things once the servers get sorted out and I can finally play it. Maybe that’s what makes everything click. I have a lot more to see and a lot more to play. The on-field game is fun! The presentation is excellent! But everything, and I do mean everything, surrounding those things makes me want to go lie down in a dark room for a few hours and think about the choices I’ve made to reach this moment. Maybe, by the time I have my final thoughts ready sometime next week, everything will click. But right now, EA College Football 25 feels like a college quarterback who left school for the NFL too soon, got drafted way higher than he should have because a team was desperate, started under intense scrutiny from a fanbase and an owner who are tired of losing all the time, and then flamed out of the league because he just wasn’t ready for prime time. You always wonder what might have been with a player like that. Sometimes, it’s better not to rush, and instead spend an extra year honing your skills. You’d think the publisher behind Madden, of all things, would understand that.