College Football 27 Review

Junior year of college was when I finally had to start making decisions about my major, internships, all that jazz.

A lot changed. I had to manage my time better, carefully consider the classes I would take, and try to plan for the future. For College Football’s junior year, all I have to do is step back onto the field, but there is still a lot of planning involved. This season’s team is playing better thanks to new offensive and defensive adjustments, giving you more freedom than ever to make a gameplan and bring it onto the field – but a lot of what’s new in College Football 27 comes down to menus and numbers and graphs, or what I call the Evil God of Numbers. It brings good, welcome additions. But man does it feel like I’m spending a lot of my season inside a spreadsheet instead of running a program or being a college athlete.

Before we get to all that stuff, let’s talk about practice. Good ol’ practice. Can’t have a game without practice, so the first place I went was the Skills Trainer. If you’ve played Madden, the Skills Trainer is old hat, but for the last couple years, College Football has sequestered this tutorial away inside of Ultimate Team. No longer. Here it is, standing alone in all its glory. Good teaching tools are essential in any game, and EA has figured out a consistently great version of them with the Skills Trainer, so I was stoked to finally see it right there on the main menu where it belongs. Props to the College Football team for listening to that feedback.

“But Will,” you might say, “you play this and Madden every year. Why are you going to the Skills Trainer? Shouldn’t you, like… know all this stuff already, chief?” I’m glad you asked, imaginary-person-I-made-up-so-I-can-structure-this-review-how-I-want. There are a lot of changes to pre-play adjustments this year, especially on defense, and they make for a bit of a learning curve when coming from College Football 26. If you’re already familiar with the Konami Code of inputs you have to learn to get your defensive adjustments just so, well, a lot of those are different now. D-line adjustments, for instance, used to be on the left D-pad. Now they’re left on the right stick. That’s one example of many. The benefit of this new system is it’s more intuitive and allows you to get what you want more quickly with fewer button presses, but that many years of muscle memory is hard to undo. I’m glad the Skills Trainer is here when I need a reminder, as well as to mention teach me new things like jumping the snap (awesome), wide receiver jostle (fantastic), and the new quarterback sneak meter (thank you, College Football team).

Another thing to learn is timing-based catching, which I’m of two minds about. See, when you throw a pass in College Football 27, and you can press down the button for the type of catch you want (Possession, RAC, Aggressive). That’s not new. What is new is that holding the button for the kind of catch you want now gives you a little meter with yellow, green, and red sections. Yellow means you’re attempting the catch early and the outcome will be based on your pass catcher’s catching stats and all the regular dice rolls these games use to determine what happens. Red means you ain’t catching that ball. Green, though, means you’re basically guaranteed a catch… unless you aren’t because the ball is overthrown or knocked away or your guy doesn’t survive the collision, which is incredibly annoying. Similar problems occur when you’re trying to use this system to make an interception, land that sucker in the middle of the green section and then… the ball sails over your head, right into the arms of the receiver.

Now, listen, I get it. A little minigame shouldn’t give you a guaranteed success/failure rate, but it doesn’t seem like you can turn the damn thing off. And, frankly, if I can hit the green and drop a pass, why can’t I hit the red and catch one if I’ve got a receiver with a high catch stat? Why would a defensive back who knows he can’t make a play on the ball (and would have a much better idea than I, who is looking down at the play) even get the meter? Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when it works. But when it doesn’t, you’re like “why is this even here?” Worse, it makes yet another part of College Football About Meters™, which is what you spend most of your time off the field staring at anyway.

Before we get into that, though, I do want to shower praise on a couple more on-field things. The presentation, which was already best in class, is somehow better. EA has added new traditions, trophies, stadiums – the whole nine yards. And Dynamic Weather, which can now change from play to play, is pretty remarkable (and can have a major influence on a game). All that of this is great, and it’s a testament to the team at EA Orlando that they have mostly solved the on-field gameplay and presentation while managing to add meaningful improvements each and every year. I just wish I was as jazzed about the other stuff.

All Hail John Block

Let’s start with Road to Glory. The big additions this year are three new positions: tight end, edge rusher, and free safety. Since I’d just spent a while learning the new defensive adjustments, I decided to throw all that in the trash and play tight end because EA has spent a lot of time talking up how fun blocking is. Sorry, Joe Throw. You’ll have to wait your turn this year. Instead, John Block takes the stage. I gave John a mohawk and Lemmy Kilmeister beard, then spent the points I had to establish his future maximum stats to make him both an incredible blocker (I mean, it’s in the name) and a solid receiver with some speed. If you don’t want to allocate all of these points, though (and there are a lot), you can choose from a preset build based on an NFL legend like Rob Gronkowski. From there, it was off to my high school career, and you know what? Playing a tight end is fun! Blocking a run and pancaking some poor DB is fun! Catching a game-winning pass is fun! But the old