Review: College Football 25 could change sports gaming and NIL payments forever

It's true, EA Sports didn't blow it this time.

After seemingly disappointing fans year after year with Madden, NHL, and soccer games, College Football 25 has lived up to the hype, and the sales show it.

Electronic Arts sold more than 2.2 million presale edition copies at $100 each, GameRant reported. These copies allowed players to play the game three days before its official release. That means before the game even hit the shelves or the digital marketplace, EA had already taken in over $220 million from the long-awaited college game.

'Every team is somebody's favorite team.'

With a Metacritic score of 88/100, it's easy to imagine that EA Sports spent more time on this game than it has on any in the last 20 years. It's been a decade since the previous NCAA football-themed game was released, and with an official release window not known until early 2024, the EA team seemingly had unlimited time to get it right.

Atmosphere

Every team in college football is authentically in the game. EA's attention to detail and motto of "every team is somebody's favorite team" mean you'll find authenticity in the stadium, fans, and graphical package no matter what team you choose.

Unique commentary, mascots, fight songs, and crowds follow every school, and it will surely impress casuals and die-hards alike. You do not feel the intensity of playing against a big school like Virginia Tech in Madden games. You might feel outmatched when playing as the Carolina Panthers against the Kansas Chiefs, but you won't have fear stabbing you in the heart as their heavy metal entrance starts.

In the NFL, every team has a minimum stadium capacity of around 67,000, and the stadiums are pretty much always packed.

In CFB '25, you could play as any number of teams with a sub-30,000-seat stadium and then head over to Michigan Stadium and have your knees buckle as crowds 100,000 strong scream at you.

Not only can you feel this intensity in the game, but the gap between powerhouse schools and struggling programs is evident, especially when you lose 57-7. The crowd noise cannot be matched, which will cause your audibles to fail, your controller to shake, and your confidence in real life to break down.

Gameplay

Perhaps everyone is blinded by excitement, but even while looking through the potential mirage, it's clear this game is a few steps ahead of the Madden games of recent years.

Gone are poor ball trajectories and quarterbacks turning 360 degrees on a dime and calling 50 audibles at the line of scrimmage.

If you think a bullet pass will sail over a defender as he foolishly pivots around despite obviously being in the path of the ball, you're wrong. You wouldn't have been wrong in the past.

Most of the simple things players have complained about in the past are seemingly gone. You can get sacks, you can return kicks for touchdowns, and the CPU can make natural mistakes.

For example, when trying to avoid a sack, I desperately threw the ball to a wide receiver running a post to the far sideline. I was so sure — due to my history playing Madden — that this ball would be knocked down or fall out of bounds that I stopped looking and started complaining. However, a diving defender missed the ball, and the wide receiver dropped to a knee to catch it with one foot inbounds.

This happened a few times, when the generational trauma of Madden ghosts kicked in and triggered assumptions that a player would run out of bounds, drop an easy catch due to minimal contact, or get suction-tackled. It rarely happened. In moments like these, shock kicks in because a decade or more of emotional pummeling from EA has taught the brain to be disappointed.

The game is not without error, but it is more in the sense of glitches than anything else. Male cheerleaders' heads appeared on female bodies, and thankfully, it seemed to be a mistake and not a political statement.

The occasional player glitching into the air appeared several times, but not until after the whistle.

The most perplexing part of the gameplay was the field goal kicking. While it is enjoyable that the kickers' skill level is much lower than the NFL's, the field goal mechanics sometimes resulted in two, three, or five misses per game, even from close yardage.

This did not overshadow the game's ability to create big moments, reward clever play-calling, or stick to a team's strengths.

Dynasty

It's unclear whether some of the scouting mechanics were glitched or if features were left unexplained. But to the layman, a prompt that says "you do not have the available hours" to complete a task while the screen shows there are enough hours is very confusing.

Gamers from 2013/2014 will recognize the player scouting system; however, it is clearer than it was a decade ago. Look at your roster or use the "team needs" board in the scouting menu, put players on your list, and go from there.

Select "DM the player" or "Send the House" to rise in the preferred school rankings or offer a scholarship any time. The player may accept it immediately, or it could be a months-long battle for his love.

The creepy option to "contact friends and family" is there, which should remind players of every movie in which a relative tries to influence the athlete to take a car as a gift or to go to a certain school to get a kickback. A little more transparency and deviousness in the game for future iterations would be interesting.

Aside from scouting, would-be managers will assign coach points earned from games, manage the roster (of course), and check the standings to see what bowl games they may have qualified for.

The dynasty isn't all that deep or time-consuming, and the preseason won't take you long. The joy of the mode comes from knowing that even if you've lost five games in a row with a two-star team, you probably weren't making the College Football Playoff anyway, so you might as well plan for the future.

Choosing your schedule and deciding which big schools you want to sacrifice yourself to in exchange for experiencing their awe-inspiring atmosphere is a lot of fun.

The depth of the game is in the gameplay, where factors like wear and tear, crowd noise, and composure take their toll. Review the intricacies on EA's website; you'll probably need it for the scouting.

NIL is changed

Outside the game itself, EA's negotiations for name, image, and likeness representation have changed forever, and few are talking about it.

Some players didn't opt in to the game, rejecting the offer of $600 and a copy of the game in exchange for their faces. Nowadays, that sum of money doesn't seem like a net positive when it comes to the potential some players may have.

The most famous example of this was Arch Manning, the legacy quarterback of the Manning family, who initially declined to be in the game until he received a $50,000 offer from EA to advertise and be in the game.

What may seem like a meaningless drop in the bucket will empower future players to squeeze a bit more juice out of EA's orange, and they should.

It wouldn't be surprising if a group of 10, 20, or even 100 top stars of the future band together for higher payments to be included in the game. While one or more opt-outs may not cause a problem, a bunch of household players being absent among a sea of real names will surely become an issue for EA.

Famously, Barry Bonds was never featured in MLB video games, but it never caused a headache because he was the only one. But if Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire were 18-year-olds who wanted a big payday to ensure their financial security, a video game that makes over $220 million up front may be the place to get that.

What EA has here is a game that lived up to years of hype and sold like hotcakes, a solid 8.5/10.

If there was ever a sign to start taking more than one year to create a sports game, this was it, but that entirely depends on how much fan satisfaction the studio wants.

The threat of at least one competitor, Maximum Football, seemed to put some pep in EA's step, and maybe that will remain true for EA's soccer game, which now faces multiple enemies from major studios.

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