I’d like to preface this review by saying I did not play College Football 25. Hell, I’m not even a big college football fan. I enjoy the sport a lot, but I really only follow the NFL and play the Madden games. My first thought with seeing College Football 26 was “so it’s basically Madden with added college flair and fanfare with players I won’t know.” For the most part, I was absolutely correct. However, that doesn’t take away that this is a good entry into the football sim genre. Now that you know where I’m at with my mindset, let’s get into the game.

The immediate difference when booting up College Football 26 is the overall presentation is a lot more fun than Madden. The college themes and the marching band cover songs are a real delight, even if they get a bit played out when in the menus. You’re provided with the typical football modes: Dynasty, Road to Glory, College Football Ultimate Team, Road to the College Football Playoff, and Quickplay. All of these modes are tried and true, and each have their ups and downs.

Road to Glory

Road to Glory is the first mode I started out with since I love to create a QB and rise them through the ranks. In College Football 26 you can choose between a QB, HB, WR, Middle Linebacker (MIKE), and a CB. Once you choose your position there are multiple architypes to choose from that will change your base stats and and abilities. From here, you can choose your journey by selecting your player rank going rom one star to five. Five star, you start elite with plenty of attributes and abilities unlocked as well as being a top prospect for any college. One star, you’re the underdog with no advantages and have to earn everything from the bottom. However, just because you start at that star level, doesn’t mean you will end in that star level.

Player creation starts by creating the high school you play for by first picking one of the six premade mascots and naming the school, then you can create your player. Your Road to Glory begins with what I find to be the most mind numbing parts about these sims, the interviews. These are so half assed and are boring ways to modify some of the stats. At no point do any of these interactions feel fun or immersive, they’re simple text message looking conversations with a character picture on the left.

Once you finally get into the mode you’ll need to choose the top ten schools you’d like to be recruited by. Each have their own requirements on scheme fit, your motivations, team needs and how well you build your tape. The main goal of the beginning high school games is to build your game tape, and without good tape, you can kiss getting into a good school goodbye. You will play through five games and each game you will choose from a set of challenges to complete. Most of these are pretty standard drive challenges, but there will be harder scheme, formation, and specific college challenges to complete.

This is where I ran into my first issue with this mode, and College Football 26 in general, there isn’t a tutorial. Some of these challenges were asking me to do things that I had no idea how to actually perform. There wasn’t even a simple explanation of the buttons to push to accomplish some of the moves. Also, if you aren’t familiar with schemes and formations some of these would be hard to complete due to not knowing what play to pick. The only reason I knew how to execute a play action is because luckily its the same as Madden, and with only getting three retries per game to start a challenge over, there isn’t a lot of room for mistakes. As you can imagine, successfully completing challenges earns you points that fill your overall tape score and increase your star rating. So the pressure is on.

As you go through your five high school games you will be offered scholarships by various colleges, but you don’t have to choose to accept until the end. After you join your college, the real game begins. This is where you’ll need to manage your time between various aspects like: Academics, Leadership, Health, Training, and Brand. All of this is accomplished by menu’s and the odd “interview” styled text boxes. You’ll need to keep your grades up, keep your coaches happy, and manage your wear and tear; be careful what you spend your allotted time on per week.

This is to try and represent the real life struggle of the student athlete life, but really it’s just a bunch of menus and a text box you click to increase those stats. It’s really uneventful and feels like its just there to pad time. The only thing that feels involved is the practice and the games. Surprisingly, the practice mini-games is where I found the most helpful tutorials to at least tell you how certain things are performed.

Luckily once things get rolling College Football 26’s Road to Glory is a fun mode because the actual football gameplay is still good. Leveling up, unlocking skills, and winning games is still fun, unfortunately, the rest feels like boring tacked on menu fluff.

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Dynasty

Dynasty is the far more involved mode where you create a coach. Whether you start as a Head Coach, Offensive Coordinator, or Defensive Coordinator you can choose to work your way up the ranks or start at your dream school much like Road to Glory. You will be able to pick what kind of coach you want to me from a Motivator, Tactician, or Recruiter. Each architype will have their pros and cons from stats to attributes, so you can really customize  what you want to be. There is a good amount of progression to go through here with just your own coach skills and attributes, but that is just one aspect of Dynasty.

The real grind is when you need to build your team with recruiting. You will start off with thirty-five scholarships to offer, so you have to scout and find the prospects that you want to start going after. There is an option to show exactly what the team needs so you can have an idea on what to focus on. It isn’t as simple and just choosing a player and offering a scholarship. You will need to make sure they are a good fit for your school, and this is where a bit of the Road to Glory stuff blends in.

Each prospect will be graded based on their proximity to the school, their own choice in what school they want, their academics, health etc. Just because you offer a scholarship doesn’t mean they will accept. You will need to spend your allotted time to influence them, woo them if you will, to convince them your school is the right choice. Each action costs time so managing that will be important.

There is plenty of depth in this process, so if you’re the type of player who loves getting lost in these spreadsheets and scouting the best possible players, you’re in for a treat. If you’re a bit more casual and just like playing the game, then you might feel a bit lost and overwhelmed doing this. It doesn’t help that there really isn’t anyway to automate this process to make it a bit easier. Just know you might be doing this for a while until you even get to an actual game.

When it comes time to actually play some games, you can choose how involved you want to be. You can play all the snaps for both offense and defense with the ability to control all players. Or there is the option to play only Offense, or Defense, or just sim the games. How you perform in the games will unlock XP not only for you, but for your couching staff and players. Besides yourself, upgrading and unlocking skills is simulated unless you want to set it to manual mode and do it all yourself, which of course adds a lot more to your duties.

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Ultimate Team and Others

Ultimate Team of course makes its return in College Football 26, because how else will EA make an additional billion dollars off of microtransactions? Look, when EA first introduced MUT I actually spent a lot of time in it, not any money, just the time to do all the quests to get points and unlock packs. Unfortunately, it seems like every new game after that had so much focus on how to maximize that dopamine hit of opening random packs and getting something good that it felt more like a damned slot machine than a fun mode. This is inherently a predatory tactic to get people to eventually drop some money to better their team. I do like that they allow you to transfer your UT to the new game, so if you do want to invest the time, or money, there is at least that.

To be fair, there is a ton of content to do in Ultimate Team to unlock packs without spending a dime, but a lot of it comes down to doing quick mini-games or short games that end when you complete the requirement. Each event will have a base amount of stars to earn depending on your difficulty and then completing additional challenges earns more stars. The stars transfer into coins, which can then be spent on packs. There is also a special premium currency that is trickled out, or purchased, so you can buy special packs as well. There is also the option of playing online matches against other teams to gain coins as well. Basically, not much has changed, and it’s the same UT that you either love or hate.

If you aren’t into all the create a player or dynasty stuff and just want to jump into some football then there is the classic quickplay mode. If you’re looking for some online challenge I suggest doing Road to the College Football Playoff. This is a pretty cool mode where you start a season and have to work your way up the ranks to eventually get to the Playoffs. You start out each season rank 134, since that’s how many teams there are and you will get promoted or demoted, depending on your wins and losses.

There is a three tier system with the 134 teams split between them. If you’re a tier three team beating a tier one team you’ll get a massive boost in rank and vice versa. At the beginning you will start at the Recruit rank, and even if you don’t make the playoffs, you can still rank up if you finish the season at rank 92 or better. This is an fun mode that really makes every game count and you still feel you get progression even if you don’t make the Playoffs.

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Presentation

The overall presentation in College Football 26 is so much more enjoyable than in Madden. This actually feels like it has an identity and flair. The more dynamic main menu and the added pageantry of the bands and mascots make the pre-game and post-game presentation so much more fun. The sheer amount of teams, stadiums, and players is impressive and, for the most part, rendered nicely. However, since there are so many players and schools, having all the player models looking as good as the main bigger stars isn’t realistic, but it can be noticeable.

While the general grid iron looks good in every stadium with nice lighting and visual effects for the grass and turf, the side stuff like audience and the sidelines can look a bit rough. The CFUT player cards can sometimes be very generic player models for these players, which standout next to the ones for the Alumni players and bigger star players. As I mentioned though, the fact they even got this many players is impressive and unrealistic to have super detailed models of everyone.

Sound design starts off a ton of fun offering college band and drummer line versions of popular songs and certain schools fight songs and such. This is such a drastic different to Madden that it initially feels very refreshing. However, I did feel like it wore thin faster than I imagined, but I think it was because of certain songs constantly being restarted when navigating menus. Certain modes have me reinterring menus a lot and when I heard Shaboozey’s A Bar Song or Outkast’s B.O.B. marching band version for the hundredth time, I just wanted to mute the music. Now, when the college songs come during games it is still great.

The general gameplay sound effects are fine with the general grunts from players and plastic smack of pads and helmets hitting each other. The ambient sound effects from the crowd and stadium like cheering and fireworks are also well done. Unfortunately, the announcing is bad. I’m not sure if there purposefully vague on a lot due to the sheer amount of teams and players, but the announcing is not good. I’d be playing Dynasty as a top team like USC Trojans and the announcers wouldn’t even say the team names. They would only say generic things like “well this team really needs to keep the wins going, but it’s hard when you’re going up against a team like this.”

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College Football 26 may not be the perfect football sim, but it is really close to being great. While there is a ton of content to sink into, there is still more QoL for each mode I’d like to see. Starting off by at least offering a an optional quick training mode at start or find a more dynamic way to offer insight during the modes so you know what to do. Besides that there are still too many inconsistencies with the AI and physics that will eventually drive you crazy and the main complaint I have with Madden as well. All and all it really comes down to if you like College ball or the NFL because when it comes down to it, they’re one and the same.

 

Graphics: 8.0 The added college flair and fanfare is nice, but with so many players you can tell character models are lacking.	Gameplay: 7.5 Added depth of play calling is definitely welcome, however, there is still annoying issues with physics and AI.
Sound: 7.5 The college band music tracks are a nice change of pace, but the repetitive tracks and the poor announcing wear thin.	Fun Factor: 7.5 There is a lot of content to be had here, but each mode still needs more love. Of course, the pay-to-win Ultimate Team is here to try and drain you.
Final Verdict: 7.5

EA Sports College Football 26 is available now on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on PlayStation 5.

A copy of EA Sports College Football 26 was provided by the publisher.