College Football 25

September 26, 2013.

That was the day that Electronic Arts confirmed what a lot of college football fans dreaded: The video game giant would no longer make the ultra-popular NCAA Football series. This was mainly due to the landmark case O’Bannon v NCAA, which ultimately helped paved the way for college athletes to make money off of their name, image and likeness, though that wouldn’t come for many years. With the case going against the NCAA, EA saw the writing on the wall and agreed to stop making the game. Simply put, there was no way to do it without bringing a lawsuit to their doorstep and for athletes to possibly violate NCAA rules.

In the interim, fans had to make do with the final title of the series, NCAA Football 14. The modding community came through in a huge way and helped keep the franchise alive with College Football Revamped. Fans would go back as far as NCAA Football 2005 in cases where recruiting and road to glory were truly at their best. Every year, people wondered if the series would ever come back in the form they knew it.

All of that is in the past, now. With NIL deals resulting in thousands and, in some cases, millions for college athletes, EA Sports saw their window to bring back the beloved franchise under a new name: College Football 2025. It’s been eleven years in the making, but college football fans finally have a new title. 

A love letter to college football fans.

First and foremost, this game looks and feels like college football. The sounds, the atmosphere, the rivalries; all of it is there. From Ohio State’s Script Ohio to hearing Rocky Top at Tennessee, expect to feel like you’re sitting in the stadium of your alma mater on a Saturday afternoon. Stadium atmosphere is truly the thing that EA Orlando nailed with this game, especially since the home field advantage matters and the popular Top 25 stadium rankings are back. Away teams will have to quiet the ground with good plays in order not to struggle or have upperclassmen that have dealt with the perils of road play.

While you can expect to be able to start a game right away or possibly jump into Ultimate Team, the game has the modes that college football fans wanted to see the most: Dynasty and Road to Glory. These two modes are the very embodiment of college football, whether you prefer to take a program to the top of the mountain and turn them into a juggernaut or become a recruit yourself and try to win every award and title possible. That being said, our first negative in the game becomes apparent when navigating these menus: The constant repeating drum line. It’s the only song in any menu, whether it’s the main menu, Dynasty, Road to Glory, etc. It’s cool the first couple of times you’ll hear it, but it drones on and on while you pump your points into recruits in Dynasty or make your individual decisions in Road to Glory. This desperately needs more songs, even if it’s a rotation of popular fight songs from various schools’ marching bands.

It’s not a Madden reskin, but it isn't perfect.

This was everyone’s, and I do mean everyone’s, primary concern. The Madden franchise has been raked over the coals time and again over the last decade for being nothing more than a roster update with slight changes each year. Given that College Football is on the same game engine, the fear that it would be the same was extremely real. Thankfully, this isn’t the case, though the developers could only make this game feel unique in so many ways. After all, it is a football game and the concept is the same.

Gameplay, overall, is fine-to-good. I had to play it a long time to get out of the honeymoon phase because the first few days of playing was all nostalgia, all the time. It was nice to have the game back and my first day was spent basically in practice mode trying to learn the new timing on passes, how to properly run the ball without killing the running back, and figuring out the complex blocking commands to protect my quarterback. There’s a ton to unwrap here, so let’s start with the big bullet points in this game.

EA put a large emphasis on the Wear & Tear system, a brand new addition to any of their sports franchises that puts a strong onus on not overworking particular players and forcing a player to spread the football around. Simply put, the number of hits a player takes, the lower their rating gets for that game. Running backs are the ones that get the real brunt of this as carrying the ball 20-30 times in a game is going to lead to getting beat up. Weaker hits mean little to no wear and tear while the big hit stick shots might bang up a running back on the arm, chest, stomach or legs. As the game goes on, more hits to the same area will mean a higher risk of injury as well. I love having a good running game, but my poor running backs were getting beat to hell because I was running them in between the tackles and mis-timing jukes or spins, leading to them taking huge hits that wore them down. I like this system! It means adding a layer of strategy, but my concern with this is that it felt like it carried over into later games in the dynasty and players disappearing even with no notice of an injury. 

A perfect example is with my dynasty as the Cal Golden Bears, running Jaydn Ott for over 2,000 yards in my first season. That was a challenge because there was a game where he took the first carry, took a big shot, and then I didn’t see him again until the second quarter. I couldn’t figure out if this was because I was just using coach suggestions for plays and it was changing up the player package or if he was legitimately injured. There was no alert and Ott randomly appeared back in the huddle in the second quarter. Still, I refused to turn off the Wear & Tear system because I simply wanted to learn it better and keep players relatively fresh. Good luck doing that when running a true triple option team because it just means all four backs getting pounded by a defense for an entire game.

Speaking of the option, if players out there are like me and continued playing NCAA 14 until this game came out, you’ll have to re-train your brain on how to run the option. In the older versions, a quarterback holding the ball was the default move when running the read option. This means that in order to make the proper read to give the ball to the running back, holding X gives the ball. In College Football 25, the reverse is true, and this is mainly because of Run-Pass Option (RPO) being involved heavily in this game. It took several games before I felt comfortable with the new system and reading the option is much harder this time around. Defensive ends can be smart enough to crash toward both the quarterback and running back to fool a player and be close enough where they’ll make the tackle no matter what. A saving grace is that running backs are typically fast enough where even if a player makes an incorrect read and gives it, they can get to the line of scrimmage still. It’s tough, but it’s satisfying when you get it down pat, just like the RPO game which I absolutely love. It’s simple in design with just enough play options to keep it fresh and take advantage of an over-aggressive defense. It can make a good player a great one when executed well.

The blocking in this game is the most infuriating thing to learn, and I think a lot of it is because the blocking AI is not good. Granted, I feel that blocking largely hasn’t been good since ESPN NFL 2K5, so my outtake is already jaded. I will say that the running game blocking is fine-ish, and hitting the holes on regular runs seems to work fairly well. After that, it’s all downhill. I cannot get through a game without eating multiple sacks because defensive lines will bust through by, at maximum, three seconds. My early games were brutal because of this and trying to figure out how the heck to use the blocking stick. There’s numerous options besides max protect, slide right and slide left this time. There’s half slides to factor in and learning how to use these with standard drop backs and roll outs are absolutely crucial to progressing deep with this game, especially when starting a dynasty with a 1-star school. After 30+ hours of this game, I still haven’t figured it out. It may be a skill issue, but it’s still difficult and seems to be more up to chance given that most defensive lines play like the ‘85 Bears.

Defense is a mixed bag to me, but largely is decent. My biggest takeaway is that the defensive adjustments pre-snap are huge. Being able to adjust coverage in eight different ways is a heck of an upgrade. There’s also the ability to mask coverages, including showing a cover 2 or cover 3, doing press coverage, or giving a cushion if it’s second or third and long. There are also individual adjustments to further mask defenses, but you’re at the mercy of how long pre-snap lasts because the offense obviously dictates when things start. Being able to mask coverages and blitzes means gaining a huge advantage and possibly forcing turnovers with interceptions or pressure on a quarterback who is rattled. Like the changes on offense, this takes time to learn from the old versions of the game. Mastering it will go a very long way.

The black sheep of everything, even including the blocking, is the kicking game. I appreciate that EA wanted kicking field goals to be tough, but this is an entirely new difficulty they’ve unlocked. The old “left-right” meter is back, meaning a kick has to be centered for perfect accuracy while also holding the directional arrow in place. Being even slightly off means a shank or a pull, and there is rarely an in-between. It’s either dead on accurate or ten yards wide. Even with a decently rated kicker in the high 80s, this was just brutal. I found myself actively skipping field goals to go for it because it wasn’t that I thought I could miss a kick; I knew I was going to miss it. That’s not fun for anyone, and this difficulty desperately needs to be toned down. There was nothing wrong eleven years ago with using the analog stick to pull back and fling forward. Thankfully, you can change it back to the old way, and I strongly recommend you do it to save yourself headaches.

The game modes are the true stars of the show…..well, at least Dynasty is.

Let’s start with Road to Glory, the single-player superstar mode. Sadly, there’s no high school games to help build your stats up to start, but that’s ultimately fine. A player can choose whether they are a five-star can’t miss talent, a blue chipper, or an under-recruited player to start out. These will determine your created player’s stats and also give you the schools that will start you right out of the gate as a freshman. It’s all based on ratings so I made a five-star QB and took him to TCU. This was after making some necessary changes to the conferences to restore them before the silly conference realignment happened but with some minor changes. My version of the Big 12 was a fusion of the old Big XII and the Southwest Conference from the 80s, so basically every Texas school, the Oklahoma schools, and the Kansas schools were in.

The good parts of Road to Glory are all the individual choices you have to make during a season. It’s not just about performing on the field, but making smart decisions off the field as well. Keeping your GPA up is vital and will give you boosts for doing so. The academic advisor also tells you that if you manage to keep a 3.7 GPA your first three years, your senior year is basically all football, all the time, so there’s a benefit to committing to the books early and often. Every interaction is done on your cell phone, and most of these are simple selections such as what NIL deal to accept that will give you and your teammates cool stuff while giving your player a boost. There are risks such as being asked to go to a party that will raise your social standing, but if you’re caught it will mean a hit to your coach's trust and might land you on the bench. It’s a true risk/reward situation.

In-game action is simple: Your coach is calling the plays. You don’t have much of a say in it unless you build up your coach’s trust to get more options to select and unlock audibles. This is my biggest problem with this mode: A lot of the time when you burn one of these refreshes to get more options, the plays have no variety. I couldn’t tell you how many times the coach wanted a run off-tackle out of a formation only for me to pull the trigger on a refresh and get the same play just out of a slightly different formation in the two other slots. It’s a waste of that option and ultimately turned me off to the mode just over a year into it. The counter to this, of course, is that you can gain more trust by playing well and building that up. It also means whether or not you start in your position. Honestly, after just a couple of games at QB, I was never threatened by the second string. Building up trust was easy simply by having positive plays and became more or less trivial after that, which is pretty disappointing. 

Also disappointing was the transfer portal at the end of the season. I had built my QB up to an 89 overall and TCU was losing quite a few players, so I opted to take my QB into the portal to see what it was like. There was no real recruitment by other schools like I was hoping for. In a time when NIL deals are big drivers in convincing players to come to a school, it’s a huge miss by EA. All the portal ended up being was opting into the portal and picking a school. That’s it. I was hoping for some pomp and circumstance, a ceremony, a press conference, anything. Sadly, there was none of that. Let’s get that for next year, please?

Dynasty mode, however, is where this game hits its full stride. Everything is there that I wanted: Custom conferences and schedules, the 12-team college football playoff, coach skill trees to truly level up my coach and tailor him to what I felt is important, and of course the best thing out of it all: Recruiting. It’s the life blood of any program, and will determine if your school becomes a five-star powerhouse or also-ran in any of the conferences. I cannot stress to you how fun and deep it is to recruit in this game. I spent long periods of time going through every position, scouting to find hidden gems, ranking them properly and figuring out who I had a true chance of signing and who to drop off my list. It’s incredibly in-depth and also super hard to manage, but that’s the challenge to it all. It should be hard to build a dynasty, and the success on the field matters to these players.

Everything you do in dynasty mode has an effect somewhere. If you play a very run-heavy style, receivers will become at risk of transferring at season’s end based on their own stats and the play style. This isn’t the end of the world because it’ll mean allowing you to hit the reset button on a school and make it your own via recruiting. If you want to run a true triple option, I guarantee your receivers are all bailing out at the end of the season. That’s fine, because you probably have 4-5 blocking receivers being recruited to replace them. It also means getting more attention from stud running backs and mobile quarterbacks who fit the system. The “Athlete” position is also not just a generic list of players with marginally different ratings like in NCAA 14. In CFB 25, a player marked as an Athlete can be found in basically every position, meaning they can be changed to any position you want if your depth is lacking there. It’s so good that the gameplay in Dynasty was basically an afterthought. All I wanted to do was recruit because that’s where it’s fun.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, though. One of the concessions that had to be made by EA was locking out gamers from editing rosters and ratings. You can change some of their uniform looks, but those names and ratings are fully locked in and cannot be touched. This was done by EA to ensure that the players who didn’t opt into the game can’t be made to get around that. Unfortunately, this is a huge bummer because not only are the players locked out from editing, but future random generated players cannot be altered either, and that’s exceptionally disappointing. There is probably a way for EA to do this in the future so NIL rules aren’t violated but it also means there’s no created players or recruits.

Let’s get to it: Is it worth getting this?

I was so worried that after I got through the honeymoon period with this game and my nostalgia wore off that I was going to hate it, but you know what? Yeah, it’s worth the price tag. It ain’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but you can pull the trigger on this one right now and not feel bad about it. There are countless hours of enjoyment here and you’ll get your money’s worth in no time.

Good will has been built, so let’s wrap things up.

I cannot stress this enough to EA: There’s a good game here. As I said before, it is not perfect. There are some pretty glaring holes such as with the blocking game and some ridiculously tough defensive AI, but I still enjoyed this game quite a bit. The challenge for EA is now to build upon the good will they have. If the developers listen to the fans about what they like and don’t like and adjust accordingly for next year’s game, that will go a long way in regard to establishing trust with their fan base. Making this Madden Junior where little change is done year after year will mean an erosion large enough that the final bridges with football fans finally get burned to the ground.