EA Sports FC 25 review: the dutiful game – but with signs of potential

Whether it’s entering the ground through the same turnstile, drinking the same number of pre-match pints, or wearing the same ‘lucky’ pants every week, football fans are suckers for rituals and familiarity – and EA Sports FC 25 is no different. 

Even in its FIFA days, playing a new version often felt like a game of spot the difference, and that’s true of EA Sports FC 25, too, albeit with a few significant tweaks here and there.

This is a game that millions of people buy every year regardless, but if you’re considering taking a season off and sticking with last year’s version, there might be enough here to make you reconsider.

The seconds of the greats last longer

You might not notice it straight away, but matches in EA Sports FC 25 feel a smidge slower, giving you an extra fraction of a moment to pick a pass or attempt to dribble past an opponent, making a more patient, possession-based approach a more viable strategy than before.  

Defending is more effective, too. Tackling is no longer mostly a waste of time, with defenders able to stick a well-timed foot in without the attacker skipping past them as if they weren’t there as was so often the case on FC 24, and tenacious defensive midfielders can even extend a leg and nick the ball away even when a forward has managed to get goal side of them. That said, it can still be a bit too easy for defenders to be caught flat-footed by not particularly quick forwards. 

Those who found the relentless focus on pace and trickery of FC 24 tiresome and felt that it made the game too one-dimensional and lopsided, FC 25 seems to have tipped the balance back meaningfully in the opposite direction. 

It’s in the gameplan

FC IQ is the game’s new tactical system that allows you to summon your inner Guardiola and set up your team exactly how you want it, easily tweaking your gameplan on-the-fly in the hope of changing the outcome. 

By default your chosen team will have various tactical options available and the best way to illustrate how it works is by providing an example. Playing as Brighton & Hove Albion in an online game I was 3-0 down against Galatasaray after 45 minutes. A few minutes into the second-half I pressed down on the D-pad and selected a preset option that would put more focus on wing play – an easy switch to hopefully change the outcome of the game. 

Had it not been for the ref giving a penalty that I subsequently Chris Waddle’d over the bar, rather than playing a split-second advantage and allowing Evan Ferguson to tap in after good work by Yankuba Minteh down the right, I’d have come back to draw 3-3 rather than losing 3-2. (It seems even in the virtual world you can’t escape inept officiating, but I suppose at least it’s realistic.)

Of course, one example doesn’t prove its usefulness, and how well it works will depend on the players you have on the pitch, but by pushing Minteh and Kaoru Mitoma – two very quick and direct wingers – higher and wider, my Turkish opponent suddenly had some serious problems to deal with (and I felt like a tactical genius). 

If you have the time and the inclination, Tactics IQ gives you the freedom to tinker like a sofa-based Claudio Ranieri, but even if you stick with the preset options available it offers far more nuance than just parking the bus or going all out attack. At the same time, though, you can also quite happily ignore it without feeling like you’ve missed out on an essential facet of the game. 

What’s the Rush?

The big new addition to FC 25’s basic game modes is Rush – an outrageously fun version of five-a-side that crams as much action into each seven-minute match as possible.

The pitch is smaller, offsides only apply in the final third, there are no substitutions, and there’s a 60-second sin bin instead of red cards, but this is essentially a game built around transitions – the football hipster term for when the ball changes possession from one team to the other – rather than the tedious trickery of Volta (which remains here as simply 3v3). 

With a Latin American commentator and fans sitting pitchside like in the NBA (albeit a bit further back), Rush matches often feel like basketball games. You can field defensive players if you want, but this is full-speed, full-court football, with all four outfield players fully committed to both defence and attack. It’s a recipe for frenetic, high-scoring games, my very first one ending with Joao Pedro scoring an at-the-buzzer shot off the underside of the bar from just over the halfway line. I was already 8-4 up having been 4-2 down, so it had no impact on the result, but it’s easy to envisage such dramatic moments becoming tell-your-mates-about-it memorable.  

Rush pops up all over EA Sports FC 25: in Ultimate Team, as a co-op option in Clubs, and as a way of adding some training elements to Career Mode that’s much less boring than all the others, but as fun as it is to play it’s hard to shake the feeling that, like Volta before it, it’s football for people who don’t actually like football. 

Careers advice

For many, the Football Manager Lite nature of Career mode is what makes it so appealing, but it could really do with being even simpler. It gives the impression of depth by just giving you a lot of things to do, but so many parts of it – from the pre-match training drills to the post-match interviews – feel like just going through the motions. 

Transfers, too, are often almost laughably basic and regularly feel completely detached from reality, with Man City letting Pep protégé Rico Lewis go for just £13m seeming particularly fanciful. Keeping your players happy is largely just a case of giving them the appropriate amount of playing time for their squad role, so there are no repercussions for denying them a dream move to Real Madrid. The addition of Twitter transfer guru Fabrizio Romano does inject a dose of reality, though, complete with suitably inane comments from fictional internet users underneath.  

But despite all that it’s still the offline mode that offers the most longevity. You can ignore significant chunks of the day-to-day management chores, and even turn off certain elements of the game, meaning you can just focus on taking Grimsby Town to Champions League glory and bringing the next Jude Bellingham through your youth academy, but there’s plenty of joy to be had doing that, even if it doesn’t have the depth or sophistication of a proper management sim. 

There’s one ‘I’ in Ultimate Team

A significant chunk of EA Sports FC players buy the game every year for one mode and one mode only: Ultimate Team.

I’ve never really taken to it, mainly because there is a tendency among Ultimate Team players to treat each game as an excuse to show off how many skill moves they’ve mastered, but also because I feel that a mode where everyone has – or at least strives to have – the same small selection of players misses the entire point of the game of football.   

Perhaps EA hoped the addition of a more relaxed, form-based matchmaking in Live Friendlies would tempt players like me in, and the inclusion of Rush initially piqued my interest, but here it only allows you to control a single player on the pitch, either with three friends (almost impossible to organise if you’re over 30) or a trio of randoms (liable to be spoiled by one of the aforementioned showponies) as teammates, which limits the appeal of what should be a highly entertaining multiplayer option.

But I gave Ultimate Team another chance and it turns out neither of these things were necessary. I don’t know whether it’s just because I’m yet to encounter the worst of the stepover merchants or that the changes to the defensive side of the gameplay have made the online game more rounded, but so far I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using my squad of unfashionable Premier League all-stars to climb the Division Rivals ladder. More seasoned Ultimate Team players may be annoyed by the tweaks EA has made to how Rivals and Champions work, but the removal of contracts for non-loan players and managers gets rid of a whole bunch of tedious admin that should be welcomed by all. 

Unfortunately the Ultimate Team interface is still overly complex for those who aren’t already familiar with all of its modes and mechanics, and on a very fundamental level the pay-per-pack approach still feels too much like virtual scratch cards for children. While it continues to make EA mountains of cash, though, that is unlikely to change.

EA Sports FC 25 verdict

Don’t come to EA Sports FC 25 expecting any drastic differences and you won’t be disappointed.

EA Sports takes a lot of flak for only making incremental changes to its annual soccer franchise, but no doubt any dramatic overhaul would be met with outrage from its committed fans/customers. After all, just changing the font on Instagram is enough to send whole swathes of the internet into meltdown. 

Tweaks to the general balance of the gameplay are effective, Rush seems to be a valuable addition (even if its implementation could still be improved), and as always the presentation is second to none, although it does rely too much on first-person goal replays – something that will have no real-world equivalent until Sky Sports convinces Erling Haaland to take to the pitch with a Francis Bourgeois-style GoPro strapped to his head.

Last year’s inaugural version of EA Sports FC was a club with a new manager in charge; someone who didn’t want to shake things up too quickly and completely lose the dressing room. The spine of FC 25’s squad remains very much the same, but it’s a version of the side that shows a few welcome signs of progression.