About a week before College Football 25’s play-early-if-you-give-EA-more-money release on July 16 I found myself at a friend’s wedding in Texas, overhearing someone with plans to buy a brand-new console just to be able to play this game. I knew the long-awaited return of an NCAA game was going to be popular, but I didn’t realize it was going to be a system-seller until that moment. I’ve thought about that guy a lot as I’ve played College Football 25 over the last couple weeks, and about how excited he was – I wonder if he’s bought it yet, and if he’s having a good time. Because my own experience as a longtime football video game-enjoyer has been… mixed. The on-field action and presentation are generally stellar, but the barebones modes, awful UI, lack of tutorials, and slew of other annoyances and poor design choices have made much of what’s off the field a slog. So, a lot like Madden 24. The more things change…
Let’s start with the good stuff: College Football 25 is lightyears beyond what developer EA Orlando has been doing with Madden in terms of its look and feel. You can see sweat on individual players, the lighting is exceptional, the animations are more detailed and free-form during play, 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 with school-specific cheers, unique turnover celebrations, and live cuts to the crowd reacting to what’s happening in real time. They don’t look nearly as good as the players, but they look good enough, and that adds a lot to the atmosphere of a stadium
Add in a ton of player celebrations, dynamic crowds that get bigger if you’re racking up wins and dress differently depending on the season, multiple commentary teams, and all the bowl games you could ask for and College Football 25 captures a lot of the pageantry and tradition that makes college football unique – and that makes this game feel unique, too. EA Orlando has done absolutely stellar work here, and I hope some of this added focus on subtle but important detail will make it over to Madden in the next few years.
I also love how much faster and more fluid College Football 25 feels. 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: This game feels 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 just 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 look 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.
EA Orlando has also done a lot of work under the hood to make sure the on-field action represents how college football feels. The most noticeable thing is how many options you have for passing the ball. You can choose between the Classic passing controls, Madden’s Skill-Based Passing system, and the all-new Revamped Passing option, where you’ll hold down the button of the receiver you want to aim at in order to determine several aspects of the throw, including the arc on the ball and accuracy. Nailing the timing for the right mix of throw arc and accuracy takes a little bit of learning, but it’s a good system that works well. That said, if you’re like me and just wanna use Madden’s system because it’s familiar and rewiring your brain is hard, it’s right there. Oh, and the Throw Power stat now (at last) affects how hard and fast you throw the ball, not just throw distance, and pump fakes have been improved. Good stuff.
I could go on about other changes from the Madden standard (so I will): Receivers have access to 12 hot route options, and your QB won’t need to have a special ability to access them. They’re just there. That rules. Run committing only affects defenders in the box, reducing the risk of one-play TDs if you’re trying to stop the run. One of my favorite changes is the Custom Stems, which allow you to customize the distance of a receiver’s route by one or five-yard increments. If you have a route you like, you can tweak it to get a first down or beat a certain coverage. Oh, and when you take a knee in the victory formation, and the game is mathematically over, College Football 25 will automatically run down the clock. This is a small thing, but man, it’s the kind of quality-of-life change that goes a long, long way.
Similarly, you could talk about all the under-the-hood revisions forever: The new-and-improved option game simplifies option plays by handing the ball off automatically unless you hold the A or X button to have your QB pull it back, and it has new pitch options; there are new coverage shells on defense, which 86 the traditional base alignment option and allow more shells for disguising your defense, including whether you want to appear with single or double-high safeties; new stick options; new animations; direct control over the left and right sides of the O-line; an improved tempo game; the abilities that, while not guaranteed to activate, separate the seniors from the freshmen; the way the screen shakes and players lose composure when stadiums get loud; and so on, and on, and on.
If I rattled them all off we’d be here for a while, so I’ll sum up quickly: EA Orlando has put a ton of work into College Football 25’s on-field game, and it shows. This is, for my money, the best-playing football game on the market, and you have a massive amount of control over what happens on the field. I love that.
I’m also a fan of Wear and Tear, College Football 25’s brand-new injury system. With Wear and Tear, where a player gets hit matters. If your QB is taking shots to his throwing arm, that will lead to decreased accuracy and throwing power. If your RB’s legs are going through it, his change of direction and acceleration stats will take a hit – and the more damage a player takes without resting, the more likely they are to face significant injury. But it’s not just hits; if your players are on the field a lot, they’ll start to wear down, too. If your QB throws 40+ times in a game or you’re running the ball with the same player every down, they’re not going to be 100% next week. Substituting them out will allow them to recover, and a good chunk of that happens automatically, but some of it doesn’t, and it’s another nice layer of strategy to keep an eye on how they’re doing. Wear and Tear does, however, emphasize one of College Football 25’s biggest problems: its UI, especially on the field.
You’re supposed to be able to see Wear and Tear on the field, but the icons representing what’s actually going on with your players are difficult to parse. For one, the meter relaying how much damage they’ve taken only tells you about their most damaged body part. And while you can bring up your entire team’s Wear and Tear status on the field, the icons are so small that it’s hard to see what they represent. The only real way you’ll see the impact of the system is if it shows up during an after-the-play recap or if you pause and go into your depth chart. That’s not good, considering how much of an impact on your players the system has.
For all the steps forward EA Orlando has made in how the on-field action plays out and how it captures the energy of the real sport, its bewildering that the UI is just generally more frustrating than its starting point. Given that Madden’s been the only game in town for the last decade, it’s impossible not to compare the two and fault College Football 25 for the ways in which it fails to give me at least as much information as what came before. For instance, Madden 24 has an automated hat count that will show you how many defenders are lined up on 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 25, so you’d better know how to do that yourself. It’s also hard to see how much stamina defensive linemen have because it’s now represented by small blue circles over players’ heads. Those circles blend in with the green of the field, especially if you’re zoomed out.
On-screen notifications are iffy: there’s no longer messages to tell you whether the pass you threw was accurate, influenced by pressure, or off your back foot, or whether you landed a hit stick. That might make sense if they’d been fully removed, but there are still notifications if you manage a perfectly timed interception. And God help you if you’d like to actually see what abilities your players have mid-match because, like the Wear and Tear icons, the icons for player abilities 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 in terms of both aesthetic design and visual clarity.
So those aren’t great, but it’s obvious that the on-field play is where EA Orlando’s team has spent most of their time. The flip side of that is, unfortunately, that the modes themselves apparently didn’t get much time at all and are extremely barebones.
You’ve got your standard Play Now feature for jumping into a quick game; Road to the College Football playoffs, which is a quickfire 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; the flagship Dynasty mode, 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 Minigames; and finally, College Ultimate Team (CUT), the college version of Madden Ultimate Team. Just like its big brother, CUT is 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 community as it gets more updates per year than every other mode combined. Is that cynical? Maybe, but we’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends.
Let’s eat the elephant in the room in one bite: College Ultimate Team is… Ultimate Team. The Challenges you have to do to progress are boring and it’s very clearly designed to take an annoyingly long time so that even decent players have to think opening their wallets might be a good way to relieve the pain. We’ve seen all that before. College Football 25’s original sin, however, is hiding 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 challenge put me inside the red zone and asked me to throw a lob pass for some reason. (You know, the kind you throw on deep balls after your receiver beats their corner and is running free down the field, not to cover 10 yards for a touchdown.) 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 – but its the kind of teacher who doesn’t teach you much and raps your knuckles when you get something wrong.
There are no tutorials outside of Ultimate Team. None. (And no, the mini games don’t count.) There’s nothing that will teach you to read defenses, learn route combinations, or understand play concepts. If you don’t know how to tell Cover 1 from Cover 3, College Football 25 is not interested in helping you. If you haven’t played an NCAA game before (reminder: the last one came out in 2013) and don’t know how recruiting works, you’re probably going to need to watch a YouTube video. If you’d like to learn about all of the differences between a Spread, Option, and Air Raid offense, you won’t be able to do it in-game. Madden spawned a cottage industry of YouTubers and websites whose sole goal is to explain How Things Work TM, and College Football 25 will be great for their business.
I’m sure it’s cheaper to leave all of this to the community or a webpage instead of developing tutorials or other teaching tools, but I’m not a fan of going to YouTube or Reddit every single time I have a question, and I’m familiar with these games. If you’re a complete newbie? The learning process is brutal. You shouldn’t have to leave a game to learn how to play it, but you will, because the tutorials are hidden in Ultimate Team and even if you manage to find them, they’re not very good.
It’s hard not to be deeply cynical about this design choice. Surely EA Orlando could have taken the Skills Trainer, which is a decade old at this point, and put a refined version of it into College Football 25. The only reason to do it this way is to corral new players into CUT so they can fall down the money hole – of course, it’s somewhat self-defeating that they have to figure out that the tutorials are in CUT in the first place, which is something College Football 25 doesn’t actually tell you. As someone who doesn’t play Ultimate Team beyond my obligations as a critic for obvious reasons, I would’ve just assumed that there were no tutorials at all and EA simply wanted college football-curious folk who didn’t regularly play Madden (or spend the last decade modding NCAA Football 14) to wander around aimlessly until they figured it out for themselves. In actuality, EA wants all of us to get hooked on CUT and spend lots and lots of money. I’m not sure which is worse.
Road to Glory is better, but still not great. Unfortunately, there are no high school games to play here, which you might pine for if you played 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 I’m pretty whelmed by how repetitive the whole thing is.
Each week, you’ll allocate Energy to stats like Academics, Health, Training, Leadership, Brand, and so on. You only have so much, and sometimes you’ll get a text from a sponsor offering you a NIL endorsement deal (a new feature for College Football 25, since previous college football games used fake players) 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. It’s pretty basic resource management and the lack of any cutscenes means you’re mostly just navigating menus and responding to imaginary cell phone conversations that repeat themselves a lot. Think of a somehow more barebones version of Madden’s already barebones Superstar mode, and you’re on the right track. It’s pretty dull.
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 Energy 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 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.
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. You’re playing as a quarterback here, and not a coach; this restriction is meant to simulate building your coach’s trust. 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 and Joe Throw is almighty. But I’m not having that much fun winning.
And that’s the experience if you start as a 5-star QB. If you start as a 2 or 3-star recruit, there’s a decent chance you won’t see the field all season. That’s what happened to my 2-star running back, which basically meant I was just playing one of the running back mini games over and over and sitting in menus managing Energy. It’s not a great experience. The sweet spot is probably a 3 or 4-star recruit, but again, it’s really a shame you don’t get to play high school games to determine where your player falls.
Since we’ve touched on mini games, let’s cover those quickly. There are 39 in College Football 25’s Mini Game mode (and a few more that only seem to pop up in Road to Glory), and they’re actually pretty good. Some, like Rushing Attacks, WR Battle, and Coverage Skeleton, are variations of the ones we got in Madden 24, and they work more or less the same way here as they do there. Others, like Option Attack, are brand new. In general, I like College Football 25’s take on the minigames more than Madden’s, and several of them, like the aforementioned Option Attack, and new stuff like Pocket Presence – where you’ll hit targets and try to avoid projectiles while staying in a small area representing the pocket – are a lot of fun. That said, some are much more difficult to achieve good scores on than others, and since doing so means maintaining a high multiplier, there are times when the best thing to do is restart if you lose your streak.
Bafflingly, when you’re doing one of these mini games in Road to Glory, there’s no option to restart it if you aren’t happy with your score like there is in both the standalone mode and Madden’s version of Road to Glory. You can restart during the mini game, but if you want to try again to hit a higher score (and increase the experience your player gets for doing so) once it’s over, you have to close and reopen the entire game before it saves. As a result, I’ve found myself picking easy ones like Option Attack and just running them over and over again because I didn’t want to waste my time restarting.
The real draw for most people will be Dynasty, where you select a program and play as a Head Coach, Offensive Coordinator, or Defensive Coordinator who recruits athletes and then builds up your school. It’s a cool idea, but like every other mode in College Football 25, it feels underbaked. Besides playing the games on your schedule, all you do is recruit players. You only have so much time in a given week, so you’ll manage how many hours you spend on each recruit. You can do things like talk to their family or check their social media to up your influence with them, but you also spend some of your limited weekly hours scouting them to get a feel for their potential. All the while, you’re competing against other programs vying for the same prospects, and things like your school’s academic programs, prestige, the player’s ability to start, and how close the school is to their home all matter. If you’re a 1-star program, it will be very difficult to get 5-star recruits.
It sounds cooler in theory than it is in practice. Mostly, you just navigate menus and choose how you spend your program’s time. Scouting players will show you their exact stats, which is a little less interesting than Madden’s “they fall into this range” letter grade system, but it is fun to find a hidden gem who’s better than their rating implies. Of course, your coach’s backstory matters — you can choose between a Motivator who trains players faster, a Recruiter who scouts and recruits more efficiently, and a Tactician who’s better on game day — and you'll level up your coach and unlock new abilities as your program wins, but it’s all done in menus, and it’s a bit repetitive. You don’t manage or lead your players in any way, and all of them always have the GPA to play and never get into trouble.
Strangely, there’s also no option to directly train your players. It kind of makes sense; past NCAA games didn’t have this, and college players aren’t pros; players level up by playing well and during the offseason, but it also means that Dynasty gets very tedious very quickly. You play around on your recruiting board and you play your games and… That’s it, which is a little weird given College Football 25’s focus on mini games elsewhere. You’d think they would be available in more than Road to Glory and as a standalone mode. And while it’s very satisfying to lead your team to the College Football Playoffs and Conference Championships (my Pittsburgh Panthers lost in round two to Alabama, but did win the ACC Championship), it means that the week-to-week menu-based gameplay is kind of a slog. Playing the games and building up your program is great, but actually doing the recruiting is a little one note. You can let the CPU handle it if you need a break, but it’s going to make different decisions than you would. Ultimately, Dynasty is a fun mode and there are neat strategic elements to managing your recruiting and building your program – I just wish it had a little more to it beyond that.
College Football 25 also features a Team Builder that lets you create a school, customize their logos, uniforms, and stadiums, and import them into Dynasty or share them with other players if you like. It’s a cool feature, and I’m glad EA brought it back for College Football 25 even if you have to use a website to get it to work. I hope they’ll continue to build on it as the years go on.
And then there are bugs. Mini games glitch out or fail to score what you’re doing properly. At one point, while I was doing the Reaction and Footwork Drill with my Road to Glory running back, one of the Hot Spots I was running through stayed on the field for each drill, which made completing subsequent drills harder because there were multiple Hot Spots with the same number, or because it was covering up the one I was supposed to be running through. In-game commentary is often wrong about points, what team threw an interception, how many yards were gained, and so on. This happens in Madden, too, but it’s still disappointing here.
Some schools also have outdated logos – EA has publicly admitted to Stanford, Western Michigan, and Jacksonville State already – and certain player likenesses are inaccurate, which they promise will be fixed in a future patch. 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 many ways – especially off the field – 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. Oh, and I really don’t appreciate seeing an Ultimate Team pop-up every time I exit any game mode, including Ultimate Team. I know it’s there, EA. We all do. I just don’t want to play it.
