EA Sports FC 25 review – great ideas that don’t quite reach their potential-Kenneth Andersen-Entertainment – Metro

Real Madrid has quite a team in EA Sports FC 25 (Electronic Arts)

The new EA Sports FC 25 introduces Rush mode, revamped tactics, and a new AI system, but it’s not the convincing win it could’ve been.

EA Sports FC 24 was a very important release in the history of football games. After 30 years of success, EA decided to walk away from its licensing deal with FIFA and create a new game under its own name. That was risk but it instantly paid off and already EA Sports FC is firmly established as the premier football franchise – and basically just FIFA under a different name.

This year’s edition aims to go even further, as it adds a new 5v5 mode, completely revamps how tactics work, and introduces a new AI system to make players around you smarter and more realistic in the decision they make during matches.

It’s an ambitious step forward by EA, but although they get a lot of things right the biggest changes don’t quite work as well as they could have.

As we said during our initial hands-on preview of EA Sports FC 25, the new game mode Rush is a lot of fun. After exploring it further, that still rings true, especially if you play co-op online or with friends.

Rush replaces Volta and is a 5v5 mode lasting 10 minutes per game. It has a much smaller pitch, where your success is based on how good you are in one-on-ones and how quickly you can think on your feet. Amusingly, it also has a blue card, which is given after serious fouls, or two yellow cards, and sidelines the player for one minute. But if the other team scores during that time, the blue card clock decreases with each goal.

It’s quite intense but the commentators chime in with moments of comedic relief every now and then, which caught us by surprise, with quips like, ‘That’s way off target, that’s in another zip code!’ (So, yes, that’s one of the American commentators.)

While it’s fun, and the blue card is great, we would have loved to see more creative features added to Rush – maybe some other wacky cards – as it lends itself nicely to be a sillier escape from all the other, more traditional, modes.

The most impactful change in EA Sports FC 25, however, is its new AI, called FC IQ, which is powered by real-life data to make teammate and opponent players tactically smarter in the way they understand the game.

The effects of FC IQ while you’re playing a game are quite hard to notice at first, but in our experience it’s a mixed bag. On one hand the AI seems to be better at intercepting passes, predicting where you’ll dribble with the ball, and avoiding your tackles.

But on the other hand your teammate AI doesn’t understand that it should cover for you if you run out of position, and it doesn’t make many great runs on its own unless you prompt them to. What does happen though, is that with a smarter AI, the game becomes more difficult, especially at world class difficulty and up.

FC IQ is smart, but is it that smart? (Electronic Arts)

FC IQ goes hand-in-hand with the second biggest change in this year’s edition: the tactics revamp, which completely changes how you set your team up to play. EA has removed a lot of team and player-specific tactical instructions from EA Sports FC 24, like team width, chance creation, and telling your winger to stay up after losing the ball.

With a new UI you now choose your formation, then your build-up style (short passes, balanced, or counter) and your defensive approach (how high and aggressive you want your defensive line to be).

On top of that, and far more interesting, are player roles, which is just like in Football Manager. Here you can choose specific player roles and a focus based on their positions. So a leftback can now play as a falseback (EA’s interpretation of the inverted fullback), a winger can play as a inside forward, and strikers can have the role of a false nine.

What’s important here though – to get the most out your tactics – is to use players that are familiar with the roles you’ve set up (they’ll have a plus sign on their card if they’re proficient).

Jurrien Timber and Ben White (circled) show how the falseback role works (Electronic Arts)

There’s also a feature that lets you see how your team will position itself with and without the ball, which is very helpful in finding the shape that you want, while tinkering with the tactics.

This works well on the pitch, as the AI does position the players where you want them, according to your tactics, and it definitely brings more realism to the game. But if you want to dominate like Manchester City or Arsenal, with a possession-dominated style and lots of short passes, don’t get too excited.

When we set up our team to play like the two Premier League title-chasing teams – in a 4-3-3 with short passes as our build-up style, a falseback, and an inside forward – it was very difficult to break through the opponent and score. There just wasn’t much movement from our teammate AI in the final third, as it all became too rigid, while the AI opponent made very few mistakes in its defensive shape.

And so, like always, the most efficient way to play EA Sports FC 25 is to play a simple counter-attack strategy, by getting the ball to your best winger or striker as soon as possible, beat your marker, and score – which defeats some of the purpose of being so ambitious with a new tactics system.

The tactical revamp definitely takes some experimenting to get right, but when you do it’s very rewarding. We would advise not to use short passes as your build-up style though, as the balanced or counter options give you far more productive runs from the AI, so you don’t get stuck in the final third.

Another issue with both the AI and the revamped tactics is that our centrebacks would rarely get close to the opposition striker, even though we had a very high and aggressive defensive line. Additionally, it’s next to impossible to press high, like Manchester City and Arsenal do without the ball, because there is no setting for it. We would have loved more options in the new system, such as tighter marking and a high press slider.

Cole Palmer and his signature ‘cold’ celebration (Electronic Arts)

As for Ultimate Team, there’s not a whole lot new to speak of really, except for a couple of challenges that will reward you with season points and free player packs. One revolves around playing Rush and completing challenges. The other, called World Tour, comes with a designated country or league each season, in which you complete objectives with specific players in your team to earn points and player cards – the further you go in the challenge the better the card.

Rush has a nice twist to it in Ultimate Team, in that to get the most reward points possible you’ll want to collaborate with your teammates in selecting players based on the objectives it gives you before the match. For example, it may want one player from La Liga in the squad, so if one of you have such a player selected it will add to how many points you get at the end.

You can combine women and men in your team (Electronic Arts)

There are lots of other new additions that improve the game in one way or another, like goalkeeper PlayStyles, women’s football finally added to career mode, professional fouls, more of the POV camera, new animations for sliding, and grass flying up into the air after a tackle or shot.

While the new features in EA Sports FC 25 are mostly positive, there are some nagging problems too. One is the new smart tactics, which uses the AI to give you tactical feedback while you play and also suggests substitutions. It’s a nice thought, but the feedback only really states the obvious, for example saying you need to attack more when you’re a goal down.

It’d be better if it gave more specific advise when it came to your tactics and if/why player roles aren’t working against certain opponents. The suggestions it makes when it comes to substitutions are even worse. No, we don’t want to take off our best winger for a striker halfway through the first half…

Female players have been added to career mode (Electronic Arts)

Other annoyances include the user interface feeling a little bit slower and the new kit animations looking weird, as if it’s constantly waving in strong winds when players move. You also can’t get to the defensive midfielder position in certain formations in the menu, without going through the goalkeeper position first, and objectives in career mode still heavily reward selfish play.

All in all though, EA has been pretty ambitious with FC 25, by bringing more realism to tactics and improving its AI. While they mostly work as intended, we can’t help but think that both the tactical revamp and FC IQ are too limited and need expansion and refinement.

Rush is a lot of fun though, and once you get the tactics right it’s very satisfying, as the revamp allows you to get one step closer to the real thing.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: EA
Developer: EA Vancouver and EA Romania
Release Date: 27th September 2024
Age Rating: 3

Jude Bellingham in great company (Electronic Arts)

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