EA has returned to the realm of college football for another game after last year’s game sold incredibly well, which was great to see in spite of the issues that I had with it feeling like an unfinished game. College Football 26 didn’t make major changes to what we got last year, but the biggest improvement for me is that the entire on-field experience has been polished to a much more acceptable degree.
Animations are much better as incidents of players flopping around after awkward collisions with other players are more rare, which make it feel more realistic. The camera shots of the fans look so much better as you don’t see the game’s late switching of character models to fit the situation correctly, which was probably my biggest issue with how last year’s game looked. It’s just a better experience to watch and play that adds a lot more to my enjoyment of this game.
Road to Glory has still been my favorite mode in the game and it has the biggest change in this year’s game as you start it during your senior year of high school. You’re intended to build your recruiting tape to encourage schools to offer you a scholarship, but it’s done in a very complicated manner that made me dislike it enough to think it’s a waste of time. You’re playing a handful of games from your final season in high school, which are focused on completing these challenges it offers before you start the game. They can be simple objectives, but many of the challenges I got required using certain pre-play features that sometimes didn’t work for me. I don’t know if they bugged out because they required features that I couldn’t use in the classic passing mode for my QB, but it was frustrating enough to make me take the penalties just to get past them. These challenges cover one drive of the game, but if you complete the goals and don’t score at the end, you’re penalized for it with only three retries per game to try to get a better outcome.
I chose my QB to be a middle-of-the-road player that likely wouldn’t get recruited by the top schools, and that ended up being the case as I ended the season making no improvement on the three star rating that was assigned at the start. I ended up going to UNC to be the 3rd string QB and I made my way up the depth chart to start in the middle of my second season. Not much of that experience has changed from last year. A couple of the practice minigames have changed and some of the weekly agenda stuff resets a bit more harshly at set points in the season, but that’s about it. Actually, I am happy to report that you can finally see player profiles for others across the country to see their stats that justify being a Heisman contender or a contender for any other award when those parts of the menus show up.
See if you can spot the error in this screenshot.
The playcalling for your QB has also changed in the game in a way that ends up about the same, as far as frustrating issues from last year haven’t been fixed. I found my group of plays being filled with RPO plays and options that I was not confident I could pull off, so I sometimes had one or two normal plays that I could choose from and the option to refresh the plays shown to you rarely changes anything. It just feels like a broken aspect of the game. I should probably practice my RPO skills, but it’s wild to see at least 75% of the plays being offered look so unappealing to me. The playcalling in every other mode is nothing like this experience, as I am almost overwhelmed at the sorting options that can show so many different plays that I’m more encouraged to not just do the coach’s suggestions and find some weird plays to run.
The simulation between drives in Road to Glory feels about the same, though I’ve noticed less specific instances where I should’ve stayed in to go for it on 4th down and the game just simulated it for me. The game badly needs to list all of the plays that happen throughout the game so you can see what happens and can see when you’re getting screwed by the simulation. This is part of where the experience of navigating menus in every part of the game just feels lacking, sluggish, and plenty buggy when it shows me the wrong player stats at the end of the game often enough. This is the part of the experience that I hope improves, but I’ve heard that Madden has also suffered from these issues for years at this point to kill my hope for these kinds of small improvements.
If you’ve noticed that I haven’t talked about Dynasty mode, it’s because that seems to not have changed much at all. My biggest issue last year was that the recruiting was too complicated and cumbersome for a part of this series that has generally always been a slog that you have to deal with to make sure your team is bringing in new players every season. I don’t really trust the game to simulate things properly, so I’m stuck dealing with it for now.
Those cheeks are not rosy enough for me.
The other new thing is not specific to Dynasty mode, but they have licensed coaches in the game that certainly adds a lot to the game. Not everybody is here, but most of the schools I’ve looked at have their actual coaches. My QB in Road to Glory going to UNC was a happy coincidence since Bill Belichick is the head coach there this year and much like in Madden, he’s not here either. It’s a generic man, but the real coordinators are there with former Cleveland Browns head coach Freddie Kitchens and Bill’s son Steve Belichick that is known for making weird faces on the sidelines. In Dynasty I play with Ohio State and Ryan Day looks good, but I don’t see the rosy cheeks he usually has most of the time. He’s too pale in this game and it’s just not realistic enough. We need rosy cheek tech in College Football 26.
Ultimate Team is the last mode of note that I’ve played here and the positive vibes I had for a while last year have worn off quickly this year, so I have nothing else to say about it. The seemingly endless list of challenges that are kind of boring with poor rewards as the big name, high quality players have been sparse early on that soured me quickly. MLB The Show gets it right with a variety of fun ways to progress both in Diamond Dynasty and every other mode it offers while EA’s football games always seem to make it an abusive job.
I’ve already mentioned how much better this year’s game looks than last year, so let’s go over the music–that was a nice surprise. They made a bunch of college band covers of various popular songs here that are instrumental and very fun, which includes A Bar Song (Tipsy), Blinding Lights, Industry Baby, and others that I wasn’t expecting when I first started the game and heard what sounded like a Lil Nas X song being played by a marching band that sounded rad. It specifically solves an issue with streaming and making videos of sports games that are full of licensed music, though some parts of the game and a few songs will still trigger YouTube’s Content ID trap. There’s also a bunch of the notable fight songs and such from various schools around the country if you want that kind of thing. The last thing I have to mention is that the menu for the music controls is so poorly done that I couldn’t believe it. Using the D-pad skips up and down the list in an uncontrollable fashion that makes me fear that my controller’s falling apart, but switching to the analog stick solved the problem. I feel like that’s becoming more common in games of all kinds recently, so I’d like all of you developers to stop it now. Please.
We you get a chance to play high school football on a Mountain Dew field, you take it.
Let’s wrap things up here with what is a very fun and enjoyable sequel that at least doesn’t feel like the rushed mess of a game I played last year that drove me to having to review the game to let my thoughts get out there so I could move on with my life. College Football 26 is just a better game than what we had last year so that you can play and enjoy it to your heart’s content. Road to Glory has the one big change to how it starts that feels like a big miss, but that’s kind of a tradition for this series if we’re being honest. EA Tiburon loved to make you slog it through high school games before you got to the real part of that mode, but at least I could use a dumb user-made Mountain Dew school for my high school that was as much of an eyesore as it was fun. Just don’t expect every other part of the game to have improved and you’ll be okay for this year.
EA has returned to the realm of college football for another game after last year’s game sold incredibly well, which was great to see in spite of the issues that I had with it feeling like an unfinished game. College…
EA has returned to the realm of college football for another game after last year’s game sold incredibly well, which was great to see in spite of the issues that I had with it feeling like an unfinished game. College Football 26 didn’t make major changes to what we got last year, but the biggest improvement for me is that the entire on-field experience has been polished to a much more acceptable degree.
Animations are much better as incidents of players flopping around after awkward collisions with other players are more rare, which make it feel more realistic. The camera shots of the fans look so much better as you don’t see the game’s late switching of character models to fit the situation correctly, which was probably my biggest issue with how last year’s game looked. It’s just a better experience to watch and play that adds a lot more to my enjoyment of this game.
Road to Glory has still been my favorite mode in the game and it has the biggest change in this year’s game as you start it during your senior year of high school. You’re intended to build your recruiting tape to encourage schools to offer you a scholarship, but it’s done in a very complicated manner that made me dislike it enough to think it’s a waste of time. You’re playing a handful of games from your final season in high school, which are focused on completing these challenges it offers before you start the game. They can be simple objectives, but many of the challenges I got required using certain pre-play features that sometimes didn’t work for me. I don’t know if they bugged out because they required features that I couldn’t use in the classic passing mode for my QB, but it was frustrating enough to make me take the penalties just to get past them. These challenges cover one drive of the game, but if you complete the goals and don’t score at the end, you’re penalized for it with only three retries per game to try to get a better outcome.
I chose my QB to be a middle-of-the-road player that likely wouldn’t get recruited by the top schools, and that ended up being the case as I ended the season making no improvement on the three star rating that was assigned at the start. I ended up going to UNC to be the 3rd string QB and I made my way up the depth chart to start in the middle of my second season. Not much of that experience has changed from last year. A couple of the practice minigames have changed and some of the weekly agenda stuff resets a bit more harshly at set points in the season, but that’s about it. Actually, I am happy to report that you can finally see player profiles for others across the country to see their stats that justify being a Heisman contender or a contender for any other award when those parts of the menus show up.
See if you can spot the error in this screenshot.
The playcalling for your QB has also changed in the game in a way that ends up about the same, as far as frustrating issues from last year haven’t been fixed. I found my group of plays being filled with RPO plays and options that I was not confident I could pull off, so I sometimes had one or two normal plays that I could choose from and the option to refresh the plays shown to you rarely changes anything. It just feels like a broken aspect of the game. I should probably practice my RPO skills, but it’s wild to see at least 75% of the plays being offered look so unappealing to me. The playcalling in every other mode is nothing like this experience, as I am almost overwhelmed at the sorting options that can show so many different plays that I’m more encouraged to not just do the coach’s suggestions and find some weird plays to run.
The simulation between drives in Road to Glory feels about the same, though I’ve noticed less specific instances where I should’ve stayed in to go for it on 4th down and the game just simulated it for me. The game badly needs to list all of the plays that happen throughout the game so you can see what happens and can see when you’re getting screwed by the simulation. This is part of where the experience of navigating menus in every part of the game just feels lacking, sluggish, and plenty buggy when it shows me the wrong player stats at the end of the game often enough. This is the part of the experience that I hope improves, but I’ve heard that Madden has also suffered from these issues for years at this point to kill my hope for these kinds of small improvements.
If you’ve noticed that I haven’t talked about Dynasty mode, it’s because that seems to not have changed much at all. My biggest issue last year was that the recruiting was too complicated and cumbersome for a part of this series that has generally always been a slog that you have to deal with to make sure your team is bringing in new players every season. I don’t really trust the game to simulate things properly, so I’m stuck dealing with it for now.
Those cheeks are not rosy enough for me.
The other new thing is not specific to Dynasty mode, but they have licensed coaches in the game that certainly adds a lot to the game. Not everybody is here, but most of the schools I’ve looked at have their actual coaches. My QB in Road to Glory going to UNC was a happy coincidence since Bill Belichick is the head coach there this year and much like in Madden, he’s not here either. It’s a generic man, but the real coordinators are there with former Cleveland Browns head coach Freddie Kitchens and Bill’s son Steve Belichick that is known for making weird faces on the sidelines. In Dynasty I play with Ohio State and Ryan Day looks good, but I don’t see the rosy cheeks he usually has most of the time. He’s too pale in this game and it’s just not realistic enough. We need rosy cheek tech in College Football 26.
Ultimate Team is the last mode of note that I’ve played here and the positive vibes I had for a while last year have worn off quickly this year, so I have nothing else to say about it. The seemingly endless list of challenges that are kind of boring with poor rewards as the big name, high quality players have been sparse early on that soured me quickly. MLB The Show gets it right with a variety of fun ways to progress both in Diamond Dynasty and every other mode it offers while EA’s football games always seem to make it an abusive job.
I’ve already mentioned how much better this year’s game looks than last year, so let’s go over the music–that was a nice surprise. They made a bunch of college band covers of various popular songs here that are instrumental and very fun, which includes A Bar Song (Tipsy), Blinding Lights, Industry Baby, and others that I wasn’t expecting when I first started the game and heard what sounded like a Lil Nas X song being played by a marching band that sounded rad. It specifically solves an issue with streaming and making videos of sports games that are full of licensed music, though some parts of the game and a few songs will still trigger YouTube’s Content ID trap. There’s also a bunch of the notable fight songs and such from various schools around the country if you want that kind of thing. The last thing I have to mention is that the menu for the music controls is so poorly done that I couldn’t believe it. Using the D-pad skips up and down the list in an uncontrollable fashion that makes me fear that my controller’s falling apart, but switching to the analog stick solved the problem. I feel like that’s becoming more common in games of all kinds recently, so I’d like all of you developers to stop it now. Please.
We you get a chance to play high school football on a Mountain Dew field, you take it.
Let’s wrap things up here with what is a very fun and enjoyable sequel that at least doesn’t feel like the rushed mess of a game I played last year that drove me to having to review the game to let my thoughts get out there so I could move on with my life. College Football 26 is just a better game than what we had last year so that you can play and enjoy it to your heart’s content. Road to Glory has the one big change to how it starts that feels like a big miss, but that’s kind of a tradition for this series if we’re being honest. EA Tiburon loved to make you slog it through high school games before you got to the real part of that mode, but at least I could use a dumb user-made Mountain Dew school for my high school that was as much of an eyesore as it was fun. Just don’t expect every other part of the game to have improved and you’ll be okay for this year.
by Chris Selogy
