I felt like College Football 25 would be a real make-or-break title for EA Sports. Madden has been getting criticized for its focus on Ultimate Team, lack of attention to Franchise Mode, and myriad legacy issues that EA just refuse to address. The market has been jonesing for a licensed college football game -- in fact, it's been jonesing for any alternative to Madden. This is EA's chance to really put out a quality product that can earn it a lot of good faith to help carry it through the coming years of renewed football video game competition. I honestly expected that College Football 25 would hit a home run with its Dynasty Mode and feature set in order to earn back that trust and good faith -- especially after it was delayed a whole year from its original expected release.

Instead, I keep feeling disappointed and frustrated with College Football 25 at almost every turn. It feels, to me, like a pale shadow of its NCAA Football forebears. It's a mess of missing features, confounding control and interface issues, bad A.I. (especially on defense), and rosters that are muddled and obfuscated by the legal tightrope of name-and-likeness rights. It checks off almost all of the "must have" feature boxes (like adding the playoff and transfer portal), but this game seems to aggressively refuse to go above and beyond in any capacity.

Strap in and get comfortable. This is going to be a long review...

No-huddle gameplan

The launch version of College Football 25 is really friggin' hard! I started 0 for 7 against the CPU (on the All-American difficulty, with default sliders). I had to play a Boise State home match against lowly cupcake New Mexico in order to get my first victory. Since then, I've been doing a lot better, but victories do not typically come easily.

I have my share of responsibility in this. I don't know the playbooks yet, and I threw some facepalm-inducing interceptions. Linebackers seem to play a lot deeper in College Football 25 compared to Madden, and my QBs weren't putting enough touch on passes over the middle of the field. So Post and Dig routes that would be wide open in Madden were repeatedly being picked by lurking linebackers.

Lurking linebackers make a lot of interceptions between the hashes.

Despite my own mistakes, the designers of the game seem to have gone out of their way to make sure that the barrier to entry would be as high as it could possibly be. The game doesn't seem to want to teach its new features, mechanics, or controls, and it insists on changing things just for the sake of change -- screw my decade (or longer) of muscle memory! Many problems that have long frustrated me in Madden reared their ugly heads to conspire against me as well. I often felt like I could call out exactly how an upcoming play would unfold before the snap, because I've seen all of this so many times in Madden.

Sacks and interceptions tended to come in pairs or triplets.

My star receivers refused to catch open downfield passes, while the CPU receivers all had hands of glue.

Force defenders refused to do their job, and my defense in general refused to contain the edge or take viable pursuit angles. Even if I expected an outside run and spread my line or linebackers, they'd still all crash inside and get smothered by down-blocks.

CPU receivers would repeatedly beat my DBs on in-breaking routes and break free for huge gains or scores, even though I explicitly set inside shade before the snap.

Outside shade was basically an invitation for the CPU to score on a post or quick slant, even if I had a single-high safety or robber to supposedly stop those specific routes.

My blockers would absolutely refuse to block the single most important assignment on the play whenever I needed a run play to be successful, even with elite running teams (such as Michigan).

My own big plays would consistently be called back by penalties.

The CPU teams would go into un-beatable "turbo mode" as soon as the 2-minute warning hit.

And so on, and so on. You've heard or read all of this before if you've looked at any review of Madden in the past decade or so.

CPU-controlled defenders take horrible containment and pursuit angles.

There was even a patch, released a couple days before this review was published, which was supposed to have improved pursuit angles. But in my limited play since the patch, it seems to have actually made pursuit even worse, somehow! Not only do players continue to take horrible containment angles, but any defender that happens to be in the open field on the perimeter, and in a position to stop an outside run, now has an infuriating habit of just bouncing off the ball-carrier. So perimeter tackles that were being made a week ago, are now being missed after the patch, giving up even more big runs and scores to the outside.

I cannot understate how much these poor pursuit and containment angles are ruining my enjoyment of this game! So many of my losses can be directly traced to my defense just completely shitting the bed and giving up big run after big run because they are completely unwilling to defend the perimeter. And there is little-to-nothing that I can do about this, because I can only control a single player on the defense at a time.

I wrote previously about my trepidations regarding the free-to-play status of Modus Games' reboot of Maximum Football. I'm not going to retread that again here. Instead, I've poured over the announcement trailer, dev diaries, and other information about the game, and would like to discuss my impressions on how the game might play, based on the publicly-available information and video.

There have so far been 2 development updates, in addition to the announcement trailer. All these videos show a little bit of gameplay, but not much. So I don't have a whole lot to go on. But I'm going to go through each video and try to identify gameplay issues that stand out to me.

Rebuilt gameplay

The first develop update, released last June, was focused on the gameplay goals of the development team. They say they want to focus on authentic, simulation gameplay. They threw away all the assets and animations from the original Maximum Football codebase (developed by Canuck Play) in order to rebuild everything from the ground up. This includes bringing in professional and college athletes for motion capture and shifting to the Unreal Engine (I think Canuck was using Unity?).

The visuals certainly look a lot better than what Canuck Play was able to create. Player models and stadiums look a lot more detailed and realistic. The jury is still kind of our on whether the animation and control will be dramatically improved, because it's hard to get a feel for the animation and controls from a simple video.

Whether you agree with my assertion in the previous essay that NCAA 13's recruiting was better than NCAA 14's, I hope I've at least made a compelling case that NCAA 14's recruiting system left a lot of room for Tiburon to improve in its upcoming EA Sports College Football game in 2023. Now I want to provide some constructive feedback and pitch some ideas I have for how Tiburon could improve the recruiting mechanic going forward, by hopefully taking the best of what both NCAA 13 and 14 had to offer.

Lessons from NCAA 14

The previous essay included a lot of criticism of NCAA 14, so I want to start off this second part by acknowledging a feature in NCAA 14 that I feel is a strict upgrade over 13, and which I would like to see preserved in EA's future college football games.

I think my single favorite upgrade in NCAA 14 is the idea of having "complimentary" and "competitive campus visits". If you schedule players from complimentary positions to visit campus on the same week, you'll get bonus points. For example, bringing in a running back along with the linemen who will be blocking for him will provide bonus points.

But you also have to be wary of scheduling multiple players of the same position. If you schedule 2 or 3 running backs on the same week, they'll see each other as competition, and will lose interest out of fear that your backfield will be crowded, and they'll loose out on playing time to another back in the same class. This is one of the few elements of 14's recruiting design which I feel retains the more humanistic, character-driven ethos from 13, and I like it a lot.

Users should avoid scheduling multiple recruits at the same position to visit in the same week.

14 also makes it much more clear how your performance on the field will impact the interest level of the visiting prospects. In NCAA 13, I was never clear about whether scheduling a visit during a bye week would make a difference, or if it mattered whether or not I won the game (if I played one that week). I always assumed that the prospect was there to watch the football game, so scheduling the visit during a bye week would impose a penalty, and I also always assumed that winning the game improved the prospect's interest, and I assumed that the prospect would also get more interest if the players at his position performed well during the game. But the U.I. for NCAA 13 was never clear about whether any of that was actually the way the game worked, or if the prospect only cared about the 3 recruiting pitches that I try to sell him on during the visit. NCAA 14 makes all this blatantly clear when you schedule the visit by showing exactly how many points the prospect will get if certain criteria are met.

If you're a fan of college football video games, then I'm sure you're excited by the news from early 2021 that EA will be reviving its college football series. They will be doing so without the NCAA license, and under the new title, EA Sports College Football. I guess Bill Walsh wasn't available for licensing either? Expectations are that the first in this new line of college football games won't release until at least July of 2023, so we still have a a year or more before we'll be playing a new college football game on our home consoles. Sadly might not even have Maximum Football to fill that niche void anymore, since it's unclear of its new developer, Modus Games, will retain the college Dynasty Mode, or if it will be as good. Hopefully they do, and hopefully it's better.

With EA Sports' return to college football now imminent, I feel it's important to take a look at one of the most beloved features in EA's old NCAA Football games, and examine why that feature worked so well, why it absolutely must return, where it may have faltered, and how EA could potentially even improve it.

It's kind of funny seeing how EA's NCAA Football series has been elevated onto a pedestal since its cancellation in 2013. Contemporary reviews and user scores were often mixed or negative, and aligned very closely with Madden's reception at the time. Yet now, NCAA Football 14 is often held up as one of the best sports games ever, and definitely one of the best football games ever. Are we looking back with rose-tinted glasses? Or was NCAA Football always an under-appreciated gem? I think the true answer is a little bit of both, and we'll explore why in the coming discussion. In any case, the NCAA Football games seemed to enjoy a more cult-like status compared to Madden, with its loyal fanbase often insisting that the college game was better than its more mainstream big brother.

Being the smaller cousin of Madden, I think the developers of NCAA Football had a little bit of a longer leash. Lower sales expectations might have lead to less overhead from both the NCAA and from EA itself, which gave the studio a bit more leeway to experiment with new and novel ideas (some of which worked, and some of it didn't). The studio also benefitted from technological hand-me-downs from big brother Madden's development process, which may have freed up more resources for building supporting features, rather than having to spend as much time on the underlying game engine. By the time of the game's cancelation, it had been receiving yearly engine, A.I., and graphics upgrades that had been developed by the Madden team. Robust customization features such as TeamBuilder and Stadium Sounds allowed for a great deal of personalization that helped to connect the user more to their game. Trophies from rivalry games, bowls, and conference championships provided challenges and collectibles that encouraged users to play the game with other teams in both Play Now and Dynasty modes. The college atmosphere and more diverse playbooks provided pageantry and energy on the field that Madden largely lacked. And the list goes on...

Hand-me-down gameplay from Madden, and lower expectations from EA
may have allowed the NCAA Football team more freedom to experiment with fun new features.

In fact, things have kind of come full circle, with Madden 22 now stealing features from NCAA 14!

I was harsh on Maximum Football 2018 last year. Perhaps overly so, considering the game's indie nature and budget price. I wasn't trying to hate on the game, nor am I a Madden fanboy (feel free to check out my reviews of the last few years' of Madden releases if you need proof of my being fed up with lackluster releases from EA).

I was harsh because I wanted to point out as many possible flaws as I could, so that as many of them as possible could be resolved, and Maximum Football would get better the following year. I bought Maximum Football 2018 in order to support the developer, Canuck Play, to that end. I also bought Maximum Football 2019 in order to continue to support Canuck, because I am still hopeful that this game can turn into to something special. I didn't wait a couple weeks and buy a used disc for cheap off of eBay, which is what I usually do with Madden because I don't want to give EA a cent until they actually earn it.

College and Canadian football legend Doug Flutie offered his name and likeness.

Not in the bargain bin anymore

Canuck isn't there yet. But I honestly didn't expect them to be (which is why I made a YouTube video about being excited for 2020, rather than 2019). I'm still approaching Maximum Football 2019 as an "early access" work-in-progress.

At last year's budget price point of about $15, it wasn't too hard for me to overlook Maximum Football's many flaws and limitations and still recommend it to people who want to see competition in the football video gaming marketplace. It wasn't much different than paying for "early access", after all. However, with the price of this year's game nearly doubled to $30, it's a lot harder to make a similar recommendation. The inclusion of a Dynasty mode does partially resolve my single, largest complaint with last year's game, as it means that there is an actual game here to play now, with an actual sense of progression and accomplishment. But Maximum made so few strides in its core gameplay, that I'm just not sure it's worth the hike in price.

$30 pulls Maximum Football out of the category of "budget indie title", and puts it firmly into the price point of "Double-A" or "mid-market game", alongside games like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Lords of the Fallen, and Cities: Skylines. But Maximum is not "Double-A" quality!

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