College Football 25 Thoughts

I'm pretty baffled at the early high reviews from critics. Being removed from EA sports games since Madden 16, I decided to jump in from the surprisingly high praise. But this is the same EA product that I remember - clunky, unfinished, unpolished, and copy/pasted assets.

First, road to glory mode is pretty barebones. I did underdog as a running back. Practices/position battles are so boring. Same 3 minigames. "Training" is just holding a button to spend a skill point. No bench press or any actual training minigames? Underdog is basically unplayable. I grinded through a whole season where you just sim every single week since you get no playing time. I get that that's the real experience of an underdog college athlete, but for a video game, I can't actually believed they were okay with that as a product. And with lame non-game activities and responsibilities, it's just a painful experience.

Animations are also stuck in 2010. During road to glory games, there's frequent popping in and out of the crowd. There are only 4-5 animations of showing the crowd. And there's a painfully slow animation of when you're getting subbed out, and it's usually you walking back to the sideline with the quarterback.

The UI is also severely unpolished. Some specific examples are within ultimate team, the price for card packs sometimes will be invisible until you hover over that pack. Also in ultimate team, if you flip a card to see stats, it will sometimes glitch snd show a half-cut photo of players' faces and it clips over the back of the cards' stats. During road to glory, reviewing team stats at the end of games will sometimes glitch and show the opponents team even after changing to view my team's players stats.

Online play is okay, but it seems the only squad mode is within ultimate team, and that has been unplayable for me. I have yet to finish a quarter with random queuing. Either I get disconnected, or 1 of the other 5 people disconnects and the game ends. Also, head to head games I've had a few people seemingly disconnect their Ethernet when I'm clearly going to win, and I have yet to get credit for winning those games, even after several days. I'm not sure if EA will not count the game for either player due to disconnect, but if so it's a scummy way to get robbed of an earned win.

Overall, I'm highly suspicious of the early reviews that came out. This is a very barebones product and has some serious polishing issues. It's been years since we've seen an entry in this series, and the fact that EA wants to charge $70 for it just feels bad. Pending any serious patches, I guess they got me for the first time in 8 years, but I guess it's a $70 reminder to not give EA another dime, and to not buy into any critic reviews.

Edit: I'm not saying the game can't be fun, I'm still playing it despite my issues. Its just really glaring, lazy things about the game. Why does road to glory not have a practice mode so you can run plays with the team? Yaknow, like an actual practice? Why am I doing dumb cone drills with fantasy spinning things like it's a carnival game? Why no 7 shot drills? Why, as a running back can I spam call for the ball in every passing situation, don't convert the 4th down, and still get positive coach points? Even NBA 2k16 oenralized your player for spam calling. Why does the team I play for let the clock run out with 2 minutes left and we're down 3 points? Why does it let me celebrate when I get a first down in garbage time? Just really bizarre things that add up.

Edit 2: just wanted to finish my post with some additional errors with the game's logic. In road to glory, if I catch a pass for a first down (let's say 15 yards), but the opponent immediately tackles me to where I fall on my back, the game will give me coach points for the catch, first down, etc. but then I get -20 points for loss of yards after catch?? And I also get dinged for catching a ball toe tapping before stepping out on the sideline. It seems to think a neutral yard gain after the catch should register as negative yards and therefore should count against me. Just seems stupid to see a red minus 20 in the top left when I catch a 40 yard bomb on the sideline for a completion and step out of bounds. The rushing mini game to score a touchdown is atrocious. As long as you run a zig zag, the last defender near the end zone does not move in the first 3 seconds of the ball snapping, so as long as you run in and then out towards the sideline, it's the same outcome every time and you always get around him. It sucks when the minigame is a full minute for a position battle. You can even run backwards and just do a full loop around the field until you create enough distance to get around them because their pathing is really dumb (playing on Heisman difficulty but not sure if the difficulty applies to the minigames). I will be the starting running back and will be in important games, I will sim to the first offensive play of the game, I will rush for 6 yards, and then I see the dumb walking to the sideline animation and it will have me sim, and it just sims to the end of the 4th quarter and we lost by 2 touchdowns. Why is the starting half back not brought back into the game? No injuries, great coach trust, a top 3 running back in the conference, but coach sends me out for 1 play and decides to not play his starter for the rest of the game in a must-win? Bonkers. I could also do an entire essay on the ultimate team challenges. "Stop 3 runs" - *computer proceeds to perform 3 incomplete passes the entire drive and punts on 4th down- "challenge failed" replays challenge 10 times until the computer does what I need to complete the challenge. Have to go out with a quarter package 3 man deep and hope the AI thinks running the ball is a good idea. like what are we even doing lol.

Final edit: I've spent quite a bit more time and there have been some comical developments I needed to share. -20 coach points in road to glory for every dropped pass "lost yards after catch". Brother it was an incomplete pass, but I think EA was too lazy to type out a different outcome statement. I made it to a bowl game - announcers got the playoff seeding AND the team CFB rankings incorrect. I played in the chick fila peach bowl, won the game, then went to the playoff bracket to see. The bracket had us playing in a totally different bowl game which is funny. A couple more thoughts - why in a positional battle do I have to continue reps in a minigame if I already surpassed the person I'm battling for the position? It's a waste of time to continue doing reps if I already have the points required for that game. Also, if I win the first 2 minigames, what is the point of the third? I won the position already. Just feels like some lazy copy pasting of drills. Lastly, and this has been mentioned in the comments, there is some serious rail roading in this game. Without fail, if you're on offense in a must-win, games will almost always come down to the wire. If you purposely try to throw the game, you will almost always get the ball back 2, 3 or even 4 times to keep trying to win the game. It's bonkers. Same thing on defense. I started a road to glory as a middle linebacker and started giving up touchdowns at the end to see what would happen. My offense kept matching the score to give me more chances to win the game on defense. If you really try to color outside of the lines in this game, you start to notice that you're really just on an amusement ride and as long as you at least try, the game will thumb the scale to make you feel like a champ. It's fun when you don't realize the facade, but it sucks once you notice that you're on railroad tracks and are just along for the ride.

Edit 9/4/24: coop options are atrocious. If you want to play dynasty mode online, you have to have your friend SharePlay/remote play into your system so it will recognize it as couch coop. No online coop outside of ultimate team. No online coop for quick play. It makes no sense that the controller icon at team selection is available for couch coop, but greyed out for online. Let me play with my friends EA. We tried to do 2v2 ultimate team and got smacked because we didn't spend money on packs. I waited to add this edit hoping they would add this in a patch, but it looks like they aren't going to allow more coop options at this point. What a disappointment.