When Claude Makelele moved from Real Madrid to Chelsea at the height of the Galactico era, Zidane famously said: “Why put another coat of paint on a Bentley when you’ve lost the whole engine?” What about a coat of gold paint?
And, despite the exciting PlayStyles additions to the first EA Sports FC, EA’s flagship football series has felt a bit like this in recent years; inconsistent gameplay, full of exploitable mechanics that drive both casual and dedicated players crazy .
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However, EA Sports FC 25 feels like it’s done. A lot of effort has gone into re-developing key fundamentals that aren’t as exciting behind the box but lead to a better playing experience across all the different game modes.
But since EA really has to put these new systems on the back of the box, they’re dressed up with fancy, cerebral names that sound like they came from a corporate software program or a Twitter account that tells you how fast it is. The ball was spinning with every pass during the game between Hull and Bristol City.
On top of that is “FC IQ”, which revolutionizes the tactical structure of every game, giving players new roles to play on the pitch and letting you develop real, tangible game plans that have a clear and significant impact on player behavior. A powerful influence.
This is a revolutionary shift for players who want to engage with the system, allowing you to more predictably tailor the playing style to your team, both with and without the ball. Us football fans can actively practice all the buzzwords we hear on the podcast from people who know what they are talking about, such as “Back 3 in possession”, “5 and 5” “Segmentation”, “repetitive attacking movements” and “box midfield” can all be achieved through new tools.
They’re also now more shareable, with unique tactical codes and the ability to easily import pro player or content creator settings into your team management menu if you don’t want to imagine something yourself.
FC IQ combined with short pass rework makes first passes and no-look passes extremely error-prone, resulting in a more thoughtful moment loop. But most importantly, it’s a solid feature that brings something new to almost every game mode in EA Sports FC 25. , brings new differentiators to competitive Ultimate Team and even makes different club teams feel more diverse in kickoff mode.
While FC 25 makes big improvements to the gameplay, technically it’s still a hodgepodge of errant Jabulanis mixed in with proper match gear.
Menus can be tedious and often freeze, especially in Ultimate Team – a frustration that resurfaced in last year’s game. Then, in the reinvigorated career mode, some mechanics for key features like youth scouting are either flawed (outfield youth players’ heading accuracy is too low, and goalkeepers have no diving ability) or incomplete (some New scouting nations have only one last name in their country).
This is an annoying misstep, especially given the positive steps taken in many areas.
But career mode is also a major beneficiary of another major addition to FC 25, which EA is calling “Cranium.” In short, it makes players without hyper-realistic face scanning look more like themselves than the NPCs in Runescape.
In previous versions, licensed managers in particular looked really bad without a proper face scan. But while we still have a very slim Carlo Ancelotti because there’s only one body type, the floor has improved a lot across the board. In a top league where most players scan, players who don’t scan won’t stand out as much as that meme of a guy dressing up as the Babadook at a dinner party – so that’s a big plus.
Again, while FC IQ greatly improves the match-by-match experience in Career Mode, the same issues exist with the overall solution. In long-term preservation, the overall rating of the AI team is inflated because almost every player reaches their maximum, which is not as realistic as imagined, and the AI still tends to build unbalanced teams, where There are 3 world class right backs and only 1 world class right back. You could fix this with some Peak Barclays or FPP headcanon (maybe the standard of football has gotten better, or the weird rosters are the fault of a fictional transfer embargo), but it shows there’s still a lot of work to be done to bring EA into the fold Sports FC is built to be a truly complete football simulation game.
Interestingly, Ultimate Team almost feels like the most static mode in FC 25, as it’s aesthetically very similar to FC 24 – even though it benefits greatly from the same upgrades as the other modes.
Ultimate Team is also the hardest part of the game to review because it has changed so much over the course of the game’s annual lifespan. All it takes is one powerful vulnerability to be discovered, and much of FC IQ’s gains and diversity are all but thrown out the window.
In the first few weeks, it feels like a progression and escalation of the shift we’ve seen in recent years, towards more non-tradable rewards and focusing on completing the same handful of meta SBCs rather than building yours through casual trading team.
It’s definitely a tall order, but it helps us a lot through better access to less competitive channels like a more robust career mode and the new game type “Rush.”
Rush is a 5-a-side game type that is featured in professional clubs, as a youth team tournament in career mode, and in the fantasy Powerleague in Ultimate Team. Where smaller courts have blue-card sin boxes for professional fouls and an emphasis on quick swaps and skill moves, Sprint is positioned as a more social, less toxic game type in FC 25, and its design The purpose is to be fun, fast and engaging, not brain-burning.
It’s fun when you have a group of like-minded people – but of course, strangers online don’t always share the same interests. But there’s also an anarchic energy to those who opt for a slow silver CB and then refuse to stand anywhere other than offside at the end of the opposition pitch, and I have to respect that.
The cliche of EA Sports games is that they’re always an iterative step. But beyond the console-generation graphical similarities, EA Sports FC 25 does a lot of things that aren’t iterative. The big changes coming with FC IQ, Cranium, and Rush bring interesting gameplay updates that inject new impetus into competitive online modes and the long-lacking offline professions.
EA Sports FC 25 is out now on PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Switch.
