College Football 25 Review: A New National Champion Has Arrived

The anticipation for College Football 25 may have been higher than any sports game in history, and that meant player expectations only increased with each passing month after it was first announced. The decade of waiting is over, and College Football 25 has officially brought the virtual collegiate gridiron back to gaming.

Whether you've had your eye on Dynasty Mode or want to build a Heisman worthy player in Road to Glory, there are still big questions for many fans about whether College Football 25 lives up to the hype.

Crowds Go Wild for Fast, Physical Football

Despite all the trepidation about whether it could actually deliver, College Football 25 has brought this franchise back to life with an 80-yard bomb from the back of the field that flies directly into the endzone. One of the biggest fears following the original EA Sports College Football announcement was that it might be lacking innovation and end up a Madden clone with college teams and players.

If you've been frustrated with Madden in recent years, rest assured that College Football 25 blows Madden 24 out of the water. Even the base user interface is quicker and smoother than Madden has been in years, and core gameplay feels faster and more dynamic than the animation heavy experience some fans have come to dread. Whether you wanna keep the difficulty low and enjoy the ride or crank it up to challenge yourself, College Football 25 makes every single snap feel like a make or break play.

On top of that, the presentation is absolutely spectacular. The sights and sounds of every game deliver the coveted heart-pounding intensity that makes so many love the sport of college football. Of course, fans of just about every single team will probably be able to find something they want addressed. Mizzou alums have already noticed Truman the Tiger is among a handful of missing mascots, and additions like the Spirit of Houston playing Womp Womp could crank immersion up even further.

Despite these areas for improvement, the development team at EA Sports has clearly pushed themselves to provide accuracy with each stadium environment, the representation of school traditions, and fight songs as well as other marching band staples. Even if your school needs a little extra work to be truly perfect, these are changes that we imagine can easily be made in future updates as they continue to refine the College Football experience. 

Dynasty Mode Steals The Show

Getting the franchise mode traditionally called Dynasty in this series right was one of the most important things for College Football 25, and the experience feels truly special. After customizing your coach's origin and abilities to focus on recruiting or gameday tactics, you can begin building your program into the powerhouse of your dreams.

While players can happily take a head coach position at their favorite school and stay there, you also have the option of starting as a coordinator at a growing program in hopes of earning job offers in future seasons and working your way up to leading one of the top teams in the nation.

Week-to-week recruiting is crucial as you focus on specific prospects and decide who your team needs most next year. Some players will be worth any amount of hours to convince them your school is where they need to sign, and others may look like a waste after you've scouted them. You'll also have to factor in the unpredictable Transfer Portal at the end of every season. Most importantly, Dynasty is not going to feel the same every time.

In recent years, Madden's Franchise Mode had a tendency to feel pretty similar from team to team. College Football 25 stands in stark contrast to that as leading an existing championship contender is going to be a very different Dynasty Mode experience than injecting life into an inferior team like the Ball State Cardinals. You'll even have the option of significantly adjusting conferences and schedules.

They've also launched the Team Builder website, and this allows players to upload their own logos and images to customize every aspect of a team. If you don't want to build a unique team yourself, just jump into the Download Center and grab one of the creations uploaded by other players. If you're using Online Dynasty saved via the cloud, even if you're playing alone, you can import up to 16 of these Team Builder creations and replace any of the 134 existing teams.

While we haven't extensively tested the feature, Online Dynasty also includes the option to host a connected league with other players or join one that's already been set up. Sadly, crossplay is only available for Ultimate Team, Road to the College Football Playoff, and Play a Friend. With a Madden 24 Franchise crossplay beta taking place late last year, there is still hope that Dynasty crossplay could be added in a future update or be a key feature for College Football 26.

Road to Glory Gives Career Mode the College Feel

College Football does feel a bit more familiar in the Road to Glory mode, as it's using some of the same structure as Superstar Mode in Madden 24. That's not surprising since players will be able to upload their College Football 25 player directly into Madden 25 later this year, but they've still done a great job of giving this a college feel and changing the week-to-week challenges you'll be facing.

Road to Glory first has you choose to start as an Elite (79 OVR), Blue Chip (75 OVR), Contributor (67 OVR), or Underdog (60 OVR) prospect, each of which gives different obstacles to a starting spot based on which school you select. You can play Road to Glory as a quarterback, halfback, wide receiver, middle linebacker, or cornerback, and each of them provides a unique position-locked type of gameplay.

Every position has three different archetype options to choose from, and those will determine the cap for how high you can raise specific ratings as well as which abilities you'll have access to. It gives players 15 different possible position and archetype combinations to choose from, but from there you can build very different players based on how you play each game and which ratings are upgraded as you go.

Once your Road to Glory is underway, every week includes decisions about balancing your Weekly Agenda to ensure your GPA remains high, train your player, or even build your NIL Brand. You'll even have occasional events where peer pressure creeps in, like going out to a late-night party before a game that could boost your brand but reduce your stamina or trying to cheat on a test to save time with the risk of getting busted by your academic adviser and seeing your GPA take a huge hit.

Building Coach Trust from week to week will give you more and more opportunities, and limited play selection means you will have to work within the scheme of your chosen school. You'll even have the option to redshirt for an extra season, and players with a 3.7 GPA in their first three years can graduate early to remove the pressure of studying from their final season (or two, if you redshirt and graduate early). 

Ultimate Team & Road to the College Football Playoff

If you're a dedicated Dynasty player or just want to stick to offline experiences, there are two modes you probably won't spend much time in. College Football 25 introduces a new competetive online head-to-head mode with Road to the College Football Playoff, and players can lead any of the game's 134 teams with their default rosters into action against others around the world. There was just a bit of occasional lag when we tried it out, but it was mostly between plays during presentation cutscenes and was never bad enough to ruin a game.

There's also the return of polarizing card-collecting mode Ultimate Team, and it'll have the same love-hate divide among fans as usual. Your existing opinion of Ultimate Team in Madden, or other major sports games, won't change here since College Football 25 isn't bringing anything uniquely game-changing to that experience.

College Football Ultimate Team still feels like a grind that loads slowly and egregiously pushes players towards spending money on microtransactions to purchase packs and round out their team. While most of College Football 25 does feel fresh, Ultimate Team is basically the Madden version with a college coat of paint. Challenges and Solo Seasons against the CPU, Head 2 Head online matches, Live Events, House Rules, and regular pack drops are all back to deliver the familiar experience fans have seen in recent years, for better or worse.

A Rock-Solid College Football Foundation

After spending the entire week buried in the game, we can confidently confirm that College Football 25 is exactly the revival most fans were hoping for. The game-to-game experience remains dynamic even hours into each new save, and we've still only scratched the surface on how many different teams, playbooks, and schemes there are to try. Every player build in Road to Glory feels uniquely challenging, and the same rings true for coach styles and different schools in Dynasty.

It's easy to stay out of Ultimate Team and Road to the College Football Playoff if you prefer to stick to single player experiences, and we can confirm that Offline Dynasty saves and Road to Glory will each function fine without an internet connection. While there were a couple of minor bugs and some schools where presentation needs a few final touches, all of that should be easily fixable with post-launch updates. College Football 25 has laid a rock-solid foundation for this franchise revival that should only improve in the years to come.