EA Sports FC 25: Ultimate Edition

EA Sports FC 25 delivers a few bright spots, like the fun and refreshing Rush mode, but stagnating gameplay and incremental improvements leave it feeling like EA continues to play it too safe.

With an overhauled tactics system and a thrilling new mode, EA FC 25 makes some positive steps forward that are unfortunately tempered by long-standing issues and a lack of improvements elsewhere.

This is a new FC, with some genuine differences on- and off-pitch. It's also the exact same FC it's always been.

FC 25's gameplay familiarity may trigger initial disappointment, but career mode tweaks and the brilliant Rush mode soon pull you back in for another year. Ultimate Team, meanwhile, remains divisive as ever – but fans of that mode will love its myriad fan-service additions.

EA Sports FC 25 makes smart choices so that the time you're spending in the game feels much more worthwhile. Rush is the best addition in years, and hopefully indicative of the future of the franchise.

An annual update to a polished, occasionally spectacular, and slightly overfamiliar suite of football and card collecting.

The cliche with EA Sports games is that they’re always an iterative step. But, outside of the mid-console generation graphical similarity, there’s a lot that EA Sports FC 25 does which isn’t iterative. The big changes brought about by FC IQ, Cranium and Rush make for an interesting gameplay refresh which gives new impetus to both competitive online modes and long-underserved offline careers.

EA Sports FC 25 is the best playing version of the annual soccer sim in quite some time, with more intelligent artificial intelligence and weather physics adding a layer of density and dynamism to the experience – albeit largely offline. To us, Ultimate Team feels like it's getting a bit stale, but we like the addition of Rush across the entire release, which offers something a little different for when you fancy a change of pace. And while the commentary and menus are below par, the overall quality of the presentation continues to be underappreciated.

EA finally treated Switch owners to a feature-parity football game last year and EA Sports FC 25 continues this by adding the new modes also available on other systems. Rush, in particular, is a great new way to play a tighter, more action-packed version of football, and the expanded season rewards system means the game is less reliant on Ultimate Team – which is typically under-populated on Switch – to give players new tasks throughout the year. Performance is still underwhelming but this is otherwise the second solid entry in a row from EA.

EA Sports FC 25 is going to be much like the game you remember from last year. While FC IQ and roles do a good job of making tactics feel varied and exciting, there are many adjustments and improvements that need to be made to AI before things feel balanced. When slide comes to tackle, not too much has changed this year.