“College Football 25” Review

I’d recommend waiting for those updates to hit and grab it on sale when it’s a better product for you to enjoy right away  Don’t suffer like the millions that have already jumped in so far because we’ve waited so long for a new entry in this series.

EA SPORTS has returned to college football with as hot of a release as we’ve seen from them in a long time, both in the good and bad contexts of the word.

EA made its grand return to their College Football series for the first time since 2013 and it has done so without the NCAA name because it no longer has much control of the college sports landscape these days. The sport itself looks a lot different with no real player loyalty to their colleges as the transfer portal created a makeshift free agency for college football and the PAC-12 was ransacked for all but two schools that have gone east to the other major conferences. The main reason for the long drought of games is that the NCAA and the colleges exploiting their players for as much value as possible ended up in lawsuits that allowed for the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals to exist so that players can make some money off of their own brand, like the one that got most of the big name players into this game for about $600 and a copy of this game.

With its return comes the big question of what has returned from NCAA Football 14 for those that are familiar with the series, which is that all of the big modes have returned. You have the Road to Glory career mode, Dynasty, and Ultimate Team for multiplayer and a card-collecting, team-building challenge mode. They also have a makeshift season mode about getting a team to the new College Football Playoffs by just playing a series of games without much management needed. They still allow people to upload some types of custom content, but with the inclusion of named players from the start, they only allow custom teams, sliders, and playbooks to be shared among players.

Road to Glory brings back the classic style of career mode from most of the “recent” editions of the series with a much better player creator that has many more options. What doesn’t return is the need to play through a handful of boring high school games to determine how good your player is going into the recruiting. But you do get some archetypes for how good your player is going to be to start their career from the instant superstar to the journeyman player that has to work hard to earn their starting spot. My main player was a journeyman quarterback that went to Northwestern to build his way up from the bottom of the depth chart until I got to start in my second season. Before that second season, I spent most of my time doing a quick practice minigame each week that actually helped me get a handle on passing and the weekly agenda stuff for managing your player’s time doing academic, influencer, and football-related activities. Otherwise, you’re just simulating each game to see how it goes, which for my guy was seeing a dreadfully awful season play out while I was the backup.

The little bits of storytelling that you get in Road to Glory are all done through phone texts that are mostly reminders to keep up on studying and occasional opportunities to party, or whatever that can affect the amount of energy points you can put into that weekly agenda. Everything else is just sterile stats and bad menus outside of the games, which makes me pine for the cutscenes and meetings with coaches in MLB The Show’s career mode that at least remind you that there are people around you.

Let’s talk about those bad menus. There are injections of stories in different places that often feature false game results which are not real along with the weird lack of ability to see any player’s stat profile like every other sports game offers. The Heisman Watch section can only tell you what their last game’s stats were and sometimes it’s just blank. There is a weird summary box on the right of these screens that only has physical attributes and skill perks, but no stats anywhere that justifies its existence. This kind of stuff makes this feel like an unfinished product that was rushed to meet a release date, so they focused on making the gameplay as good as possible while letting everything else kind of suffer.

The worst part of College Football 25 has to be the simulation, both during games and when advancing to the next week. With Road to Glory or with playing just offense or defense in Dynasty, you’ll see plenty of the simulation screen where you can start simulating the part of the game you’re not involved with along with a history of play results for the entire game, which you can only access here. I’ve seen multiple instances in the career mode where I reached 4th down to end my drive only to find out that we somehow got the ball back quickly, which I verified later that the “coach” ran a 4th down play with my QB to get the 1st down. 

That’s not even the worst thing that the AI  “coach” has done, as I’ve gotten down to the end of the game with 30 seconds left where I’m about to score the winning touchdown or field goal, but the stupid coach takes over and simulates what is probably some stupid decision to keep going for it with my QB where they either go to overtime or lose without letting me have any control of these decisions. My only recourse would be to try to call a no huddle in hopes of avoiding the coach taking over, but I should not have to deal with that crap! I just lost a game to Ohio State 29-28 while I was at their 2 yard line with about 30 seconds left and just exited out of the game to prevent it from saving that garbage result. This kind of stuff needs to be fixed ASAP, and the devs have said they’re working on fixes for various complaints people have had, but who knows what they’re focusing on and when that update will come out.

The other place where the simulation falls apart is when you’re advancing to the next week. It seems like all of the teams are too closely rated to allow upsets to continuously happen at any point of the year. On one hand, that’s kind of awesome, but when Ohio State’s 2-8 with a win-less Big Ten record in 2026 as the worst team in the Big Ten while they’re rated a 90 as one of the best-rated teams in the country, it’s not working correctly. I don’t know what the exact issues must be, but I’d guess the random generation of scores and stats is off and the various recruiting, transfer protocol, and depth chart-managing systems are not working well together to emulate the way that the top teams rarely lose to bad teams and tend to keep a steady roster of great players that help them be at the top or close to it consistently. 

I’m not even going to get into the weird Coach Trust system of managing the depth chart in Road to Glory where my QB got Northwestern to a decent Bowl Game win and lost his starting job the following season. When the other QBs had higher ratings that got them automatically ranked higher on the depth chart, but my Coach Trust score was well above their scores that caused me to miss the first game of the season before I could win two position battles across three weeks of the season to get my starting job back. It’s a neat idea for how to handle the sometimes fluid way rosters are handled that just isn’t executed well at all.

The one positive benefit of that Coach Trust meter is that my QB gets to expand from the one play the “coach” picks for you to three, which can be nice when you want a pass play instead of a run or just a few extra options to choose from. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat that you have no option to audible from the line of scrimmage like QBs do get to do in real life. That was even a thing you’d eventually earn in the old games, but the only thing close to that is going No Huddle so that you skip the playcalling screen and get a few plays to choose from that are often better than what you sometimes get during the game.

I haven’t played Dynasty as much as I’d have liked at this point because the career mode is easier to burn through a whole season. They’ve added some new things like the threat of your players entering the transfer protocol and recruiting has been changed up a bit, but the rest is pretty similar to what you’d expect. You do make your own coach since there are no real coaches in this game and they’re the exact opposite of the players since you have no options to choose from in almost every way. Coaches earn XP that feels like it relies a lot on your players getting drafted for the early bonuses you’d get and I’ve seen that there’s a max XP that is easy to reach without being able to max out the skill tree, which seems like a similarly flawed system like Road to Glory’s Coach Trust that feels like an unfinished idea.

Recruiting might be the most complicated system in this entire game that is confusing up front since you have the same kind of hours to spend on players, but you’re spending those hours very differently that makes me feel like I’m missing a real tutorial to this feature. It’s like you’re investing points into players’ recruitment where I largely had no clue how any of it affected the recruit’s opinion of those efforts. It makes me just want to let the AI handle it, but then I assume it’ll do a poor job at it anyway. At least the Dynasty mode has a lot of customization options for moving teams around, changing conferences, or even adding new conferences if you want to get weird with it.

Despite all of my complaints over the past several paragraphs, the gameplay itself is still a lot of fun in spite of the simulation’s desire to undermine that at every turn. I do have to admit that I play with the “classic” simplified passing controls since every time I’ve tried to use the precision passing system they’ve had for the past few Maddens, my brain melts at a certain point over how much extra work it requires that I just don’t want. I also usually play with the default Varsity difficulty that is weirdly brutal with worse players like my career mode QB or the Kent State team I’m the offensive coordinator for in Dynasty mode. Bad passes often get intercepted and sacks are easy to rack up as I try to stay in the pocket while the play develops. Maybe I should just check out the user-made sliders that could help me out since I’ve stopped bothering with sliders in sports games if they don’t have a dynamic difficulty system like MLB The Show has had for the better part of a decade at this point.

It’s just fun to see receivers start to get open and get a great pass out to them for a big gain along with running backs getting great blocking to let them get some big runs. There is just a simple joy to be had when this game is working well that is hard to deny. Defense is also fun when things are going well, though I feel like the way the game is supposed to switch to the closest player to the ball during the play doesn’t work as often as it’s supposed to work. It’s the nature of defense that you’re mostly trying to minimize the damage rather than stop every play from working, though my defensive style tends to be better at run defense than pass defense.

All I’ll say about the Ultimate Team mode is that it is ridiculous that the tutorials are hidden in UT for the many players that will either be playing this game as their first EA SPORTS football game in 11 years or be jumping in for the first time. Everything else is boring challenges, multiplayer against people that destroy me instantly, and a terrible roster system that keeps equipping this terrible all-black custom jersey that I hate so much that I just want to sell those cards so I never have to see them again.

With all of the complaints I have about the presentation of the game in the menus, the presentation in the games is top notch. This game looks so good as the first EA SPORTS game that is exclusive to the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S that I’m just enjoying watching the schools-specific intros to see the various traditions being played out with the new schools that I face. The only thing that ruins it are the various cuts to cheerleaders and the crowd where you see lots of those character models popping in after the camera cuts to them, which makes it feel like an unfinished product. It is wild that despite those crappy camera cuts, you rarely ever see the sideline or the coach, which is a shame when my Kent State offensive coordinator is a 7 foot giant and I’m convinced that they don’t show the coaches because they have no real coaches in this game. The commentary is awful and that’s all I’ll really say about the audio, as everything else is marching band music and brief hints of licensed songs from the stadium speakers.

I’ll end this by saying that College Football 25 is a lot of fun to play from moment to moment, and so much else about this game seems hellbent to sour the experience because it feels like an unfinished game. I do hope the update that developers have talked about is out soon and fixes many of these issues so I have a reason to come back to update this review. Otherwise, what we’ve got here is a solid place to build from over the course of this year so that we have a good reason to be excited about the next game. I’ll keep playing this game and keep being annoyed at having to restart a game because the dumb coach takes control away from me. I’d recommend waiting for those updates to hit and grab this when it is on sale that way it’s a better product for you to enjoy right away. Don’t suffer like the millions that have already jumped in so far because we’ve waited so long for a new entry in this series.