EA SPORTS FC 25

So the thing about EA Sports FC 25, and really most sports games, is that you have to look for evolution not revolution. Sports leagues around the world follow an annual calendar. But games, at least games of this size and scale, do not. Those games typically require multi-year development cycles between each installment. Even games like Call of Duty, which tries to be an exception to this rule to cash in annually on the holiday rush, skirts the timeline not by shortening the dev time but instead by employing multiple development studios across separate multi-year projects. It's either that or move to a service model where the game is the game and the annual updates are offered as downloadable seasonal content drops. But sports games can't aren't willing to do any of that, not just because they want to follow the release of the new season for the sport they simulate, but because there is a lot of money to be made in hitting the reset button every year - making your fanbase buy a new copy of the latest title and inject new revenues into the microtrasnaction empires required to re-build your team in modes like Ultimate Team. So by their nature, sports games operate on rushed development timelines and can't offer wholesale revolutions, but do try and sprinkle in evolution year after year to refine their product; despite it still coming at full cost to the consumer. 

Thus far, fans of sports game have been willing to accept this, especially because competition among the various sports themselves has whittled thinner and thinner over the years. When I was growing up there were two top end American football games, three if you count the college version of EA's flagship. Then you had two top tier basketball titles, a handful of mostly bad baseball games, and a single hockey title (even though Blades of Steel can never be topped in my heart). There were also two top tier soccer titles. Actually EA's rival, Konami's Pro Evo, was the better and dominant series for a long while until late into the first decade of the 2000s. That's when EA's FIFA series, as it was then known, with its superior licensing and dedication to slow the game down into more a sim and less of an arcade feel, took off like a rocket. Ok, so maybe Pro Evo isn't completely dead, and should even be commended for making the bold move to try and go live service; problem is it feels more like it's just cosplaying as a football game these days with a launch so disastrous I haven't given it an honest second look in two years, nor has it made any news of note to warrant that look. 

So when we look at EA Sports FC 25, we have to look at it through a certain lens: it's not so much a question of whether this is worth the $70. It's not, and probably never will be when produced on these crunched single year cycles. It's almost something more like sports fandom. You're probably not dumping your favorite team even if they had a terrible offseason and are set for a losing record. If you love the beautiful game, like I do, even a middling to bad EA FC game sometimes is better than not playing at all. Something has to scratch that itch to get a game of footy and there aren't any other alternatives. So what's the outlook for this season then?

Well, things start off pretty well. Just turning on the game lands you into an opening monologue by footballing legend Zidane all about tactics. It makes you want to run through a wall when the speech reaches its crescendo of a conclusion and he utters "Welcome to ze club," catapulting you into the game. It's a solid, exciting and emotional start to this year's journey. Unfortunately it's not long after that the cracks do start to show.

FIFA bugs are notorious to the point a parade of videos can be found on places like YouTube with a simple search. And while the on-field glitches can be hilarious, this year's effort seems most beset by off-field issues; especially in the menus. It's not even just the bugs. Sure, assets frequently fail to load properly and you get to blank screens; but there was some slight redesigns to how things are structured and tiered that makes it very awkward to navigate where you want to go. Objectives, SBCs, Transfers, nearly every menu option digs you in a level deeper in the navigation with no way to quick switch back to the other options. The UI and facilities are all there, but there was a design decision to make every navigation take two steps where it could and probably should only take one. It's pretty confusing at first as places you want to go just seem to disappear but it gets easier to navigate when you come to understand this lack of intuition in the design and recognize you always have to back out of wherever you are before you can go across to anywhere else.

You can't quick swap from the transfers in Ultimate Team over to the SBC or squad where you want to actually place the player you just bought. You have to first manually back away from where you've landed before you can sidestep to where you want to go. And it's not just big picture menu navigation. I'm playing Rush with a created player and want to use my newly acquired skill points to upgrade my player, but that’s no where to be found in the Rush mode. Why? Because it’s hidden behind the character's presets. Presets aren't just presets, you see? No no, they lead to customizations, like a back alley speakeasy. Don't hurt yourself overthinking it, there is no logic there. Or the time I was totally locked out from selecting a captain in Draft Mode and even tried resetting my game only to realize it was terrible UI that made me first accept an unintuitive message before I could go on with the choice of said captain. It's the type of thing where there was enough legitimate bugs elsewhere that the bad user experience and design was more easily assumed to be yet another of many bugs. 

Also, rewards have been pretty drastically restructured. The Objectives and seasonal reward content from Ultimate Team now span the entire game. Career Mode, Pro Clubs, Player Careers, the new Rush mode, all share XP gains and pull rewards from the seasons. The majority of the rewards are still Ultimate Team based, but overall I think this is a net positive. I didn't run any numbers but the net gain seems more generous doling out of XP at face value, I can progress the seasonal ladder in more ways than just Ultimate Team. The monkey's paw would be if the XP needed (now actually titled SP - I think for Season Points?) raised accordingly with the new avenues by which to gain it; but in my first season I didn't really feel that was the case... when it works. There were some bugged objectives that failed to reward me with points on accomplishments I had definitely and clearly aquired; or other times where a page wouldn't actually reset on its weekly trigger and lock me out from re-earning what I should be able to. 

As for that new Rush mode, it is a vast improvement over Volta which it largely replaced, but has its rough edges. I really didn't like the style or gameplay of Volta and overall I think Rush does a very good job of creating a party arena atmosphere with its 4v4 (plus an AI goalie) end to end action that even kicks off with a mad race to the ball like in the clip above. The downside is that it's a mode most often marked by steamrolling results; and that's not even to mention the frequency with which individual players load into the mode and just stop competing altogether. It's not an epidemic, but every few games one side or the other will be ruined by someone just walking away from the game and going AFK. It's often at the start, sometimes halfway through. It is a 4v4 mode, remember? So playing with 25% of your team missing in action is not something you can even work around with good team play, like when a man down in an 11v11 game. So it's something that really does need a better solution. But even when every player is actually playing, very rarely does Rush ever play out to a competitive contest, at least in my experience. Someone is going to score 6-10 goals while the other team is only going to net a few. And given that I end up on either side of those scorelines as frequently as the other, I'm not feeling it's strictly a skill issue. On the whole it is more fun than not, even if it doesn't always feel the most fair or balanced. Rush does elevate to more of an arcade-y feel to it, with fast action and wide open space when a mistake is punished.

Same can be said to a slightly lesser degree with Ultimate Team - the packs based money printing microtransaction machine EA has cultivated over the years. Ultimate Team still plays a bit faster and more familiar, but the gameplay does start slowing down here as opposed to Rush. That gameplay slows even more noticeably so in modes like Career Mode. There is some player variance here, as the better players do play faster but on the whole the game has lost a step of pace. I feel like there is a lot of community angst over FS 25, and can't help but wonder if much of it is due to this pivot to a more sim-like, but much more methodical style of play. I believe the developers are really starting to harness the game engine switch to which they pivoted to a few years ago and slowing the game allows the nuance in dribble direction, passing strengths, player size and power, and all of these other factors to come into play. Each match and each opponent feels all the more unique as all of these individual player attributes start contributing play by play into the on-field action. But as we already established with these one year dev cycles, they could only first just sneak the bones of the engine in two years ago when the changeover happened. Then last year offered a chance to expand some muscle on there with player roles, and this year we are starting to really complete the package with details like skin and hair and how it effects the game. It's the kind of thing a longer dev cycle would just deliver at launch, but it took EA FC three years to iterate on and bring to life this golem that is finally on offer.

I happen to like the changes and slower approach. Yeah, it's very frustrating when an attacker gets closed down for pace on a breakaway because defenders without the ball have a tilted advantage over the man actively dribbling. It's exaggerated, but not completely untrue to real life. And for every gameplay negative like that, the increased directional control in a player's movement, uncertainty and unpredictability with first touches, and so many little tweaks move the game closer to simulation and let each match play out all the more uniquely. It's a net positive to the gameplay overall; that is if you're looking for a simulation game and hard fought, strategic 2-1 results spent probing for openings rather than simply exploiting pace in end to end dribble and sprint fests of year's past. If you just want to go all gas no brakes and slide up and down the pitch like a pinball machine, then outside of some moments in Rush or higher skilled Ultimate Team creations you're going to be disappointed.  

After those gameplay and pacing changes, the next largest overarching change really goes back to Zidane's opening monologue: tactics. Tactics and how you set up your team are no longer a backseat option in navigating the game. Most of this is by design but some of it is almost certainly attributed to bugs. For example, more than a few times I've noticed formation changes in Ultimate Team carried the individual instructions from the initial position into completely inappropriate positions in the new formation. For example: you swap from a 4-4-2 to a 4-3-3 and a central midfielder in a more defensive "Holding" role carries those instructions over into being lined up as a winger and expected to push the attack. If you go into to edit the individual player they will be still show the old instructions, which are not even valid instructions for the new role. Rightfully, if you correct them into a new instruction the old ones disappear as an option. So if you can't understand why your winger refuses to make penetrating runs, that's probably your culprit. It's a shame that just as tactics start taking such a front seat in the gameplay, little oversights like that become extremely detrimental to the whole experience as it crumbles the tactical set up like a house of cards.

But when things are working, they hum. True football sims like Football manager dive so deep into tactical set ups that you don't even really play the game. So how does EA Sports FC 25 avoid the pitfall of endless spreadsheets, menus, and sliders? Introducing FC IQ. Basically, rather than get bogged down in instruction and positioning minutiae, you assign broad stroke player roles and the "AI" powered FC IQ will fill out the rest for your players. The better and more suited the player, the better they can live out that role. There are 31 roles in total and within each role one to three "Focuses" for over 50 total player set ups. This is the real evolutionary deliver of this year's iteration of the game. As the FC IQ deep dive details: 

"You can think of our systems like this: HyperMotionV refers to the unique motion characteristics of players, OVR is the representation of physical and mental attributes, PlayStyles are the on-the-ball skills, and Roles are the off-the-ball abilities."

There are also a number of other quality of life upgrades to the game. Tactics can now be easily imported through shared codes. Each Manager item comes with a default tactical set up that can be copied into your team with a single click. Then you have a change to Squad Battles within Ultimate Team where this year they only count the first 12 games. Squad Battles always straddled some difficult terrain as it was the major source to play outside PvP and still earn rewards, but also mapped to so many Objectives you were constantly fielded less than optimal (or "ultimate") teams. Now you can go hard for 12 games then fulfill every objective with the zaniest meme team you can assemble, all without ever dipping your toe into online play. And the new SBC Pile for untradeable duplicate cards is a godsend. SBCs, or Squad Based Challenges are way to complete puzzles by deleting players cards into various puzzle criteria for new and better cards or pack rewards. Last year I finished my Ultimate Team journey with over 1000 unopened packs because I was always holding on to untradeable, but valuable, extra cards. I could only file them into SBCs at a glacial pace while the unopened rewards just kept piling up behind them. Now I slide them over into the SBC Pile and load that pile right in when trying to complete the SBCs themselves. 

Is EA Sports FC 25 worth $70? No, of course not; but that never should have been the question. This game's evolution is significant, with real strides taken in utilizing the new game engine and implementing more tactical control over you team. But it really does suffer around the edges with bugs and annoyances. The reality is you don't actually have to pay AAA prices for this one, even though you might still get full value for that money considering most of us will be playing whatever the current iteration of the game is practically every day for the next year. But if you want to save a few bucks, the EA FC series is always a prime candidate for Black Friday deals and frequently hits sales. At the time of publishing this review Amazon is running a 50% off deal for the game right now despite it only being a few weeks old. If you need to scratch that football itch, you won't do better than EA Sports FC 25, for better and worse. The game has issues, but I can't say it's worse than either of the last two iterations.