I previously wrote in one of my Fresh Look columns about my time playing EA Sports College Football 25 on the PlayStation 5. In it I mentioned my time in its Road to Glory Mode as a very mediocre West Virginia University quarterback. I also talked about how in the title’s Dynasty Mode I started out in a different career as a defensive coordinator and worked my way up to a head coach.
Since then, I have spent many hours playing EA Sports College Football 25 and I’m ready to describe its gameplay in depth. However, I will give just a few spoilers, namely, that this is one of the best football titles ever made. It should easily be the sports game of the year and is a heck of a lot of fun to play, especially for those who are really into college football.
As a brief recap and history of this college football series and the long gaps between its games, there are a lot of reasons why it’s been over 10 years without releasing a new title. Originally, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, which is the organization that regulates student athletics for about 1,100 schools, adopted rules that prohibited students from getting paid for their athletics. This included gifts, which were defined as anything from free food to discounted hotel rooms. And yet, EA was making college football titles that had the images of students and their likenesses with only their names missing from the roster. But everyone knew who the college players were supposed to be, and yet the NCAA prevented the students from getting paid.
The students sued, and that series was discontinued. The NCAA finally caught up with the times and adopted a new policy called Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) which states that students own their names and likenesses and can get paid when they are used in video games or any other place. Now the series is back, but with the real names of all the college players and with those students getting paid too.
Once EA was able to start over with their college football series, they really dug into each and every college and captured everything from their players to the campus culture, as well as the essence of each program. And let me tell you, what they did was impressive. For example, for my alma mater West Virginia University, the title now has everything from the students in their Mountaineers coonskin caps to a beautiful recreation of the Mountaineer Field at Milan Puskar Stadium. And for the current school where I am studying, Sam Houston State, EA College Football 25 has accurately portrayed every single detail of college football life, right down to the slogan for the Sam Houston Bearkats: “Eat-em Up Kats.” No matter where you went to school or what team you follow, expect to find them accurately portrayed in this game and on its fields.
Dropping into the actual gameplay, I was very impressed. The controls are easy to master and very precise, and the animation is smooth. I don’t remember ever playing a football game that was this responsive before. The tackling looks brutal and lifelike, helping to make this one of the best EA titles in many years for any sport. Additionally, the artificial intelligence that plays both your opponents and whatever players on your team you are not controlling at the time is very smart. The AI does a great job of performing like the real student athlete that each player on the field represents.
Gone are the days from the older NCAA titles where there were a few key plays that the defense simply could not cover. I tried some of those old tricks, and it resulted in quite a few busted plays, turnovers, and losses in the Road to Glory Mode. Just like in real football, you have to outsmart and outplay opponents if you want to score, much less win.
I spent a lot of time in Dynasty Mode, which I thought was one of the most fun that College Football 25 offers. There are a lot of innovative new features like the ability to hire coordinators to beef up your players and team. This is such a great new feature that I really wish that it had been included in some of the older Madden NFL games. Having player controlled coordinators or those which you can hire to help with specific skills is a literal game-changer that brings College Football 25 to the point where it’s almost like a remake of the NFL Head Coach series.
The overall control you have with building teams is incredible. Yes, the recruiting side of it has a bit of a learning curve, but it gets easier over time. It quickly became one of my favorite features. There is also a transfer portal you can use to add additional firepower to teams if you need to really lean into a strength or help shore up weak points in on-field performance. This makes it so that you don’t have to always grab a superstar high school kid for every position on your roster, although doing so really helps.
As with any Madden-like title, I have not spent too much time with the Ultimate Team Mode yet. I don’t really enjoy multiplayer when it comes to titles like this, although I know a lot of people do. The gameplay in Ultimate Team Mode is just as good as in the single player modes, and it’s extremely easy to find opponents to play with online. However, that said, EA has also included plenty of single player gameplay to enjoy. I have spent hundreds of hours on EA College Football 25 and am not bored in the least. I have enjoyed College Football 25 more than any Madden title I’ve played, and that is saying a lot.
If you have been on the fence about getting EA Sports College Football 25, don’t be. It will make a great holiday present for yourself or any sports fan in your life with either a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X to run it. It’s sadly not out for the PC, so for now it can only be played on one of those next generation consoles.
After spending so much time with EA Sports College Football 25, I can say that it’s clear that it was developed by people who actually love college football and everything that goes with that from the student athletes to the campus culture of each individual school. I almost never give out perfect scores for anything I review, but EA Sports College Football 25 earns that and more. We’ve been waiting over a decade for a sports title like this, and EA Sports College Football 25 is worth it.