EA Sports FC 25 review – great ideas that don’t quite reach their potential

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).

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.

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.

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…

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