EA Sports College Football 27 Review – The Other Football

When the EA Sports College Football franchise returned from over a decade of dormancy, everything felt fresh. Back in CFB 25, when we hadn’t had a new game in the franchise since before the birth of the College Football Playoff, the return to iconic Saturday gameday atmospheres and the modernization of flagship modes like Dynasty and Road to Glory were all we needed. Now on its third release of the new era, after what was a largely incremental upgrade last year, CFB 27 risks losing the luster that came with the franchise’s built-in hype.

Without a ton of new content, the existing modes come under a stronger microscope regarding their tweaks and upgrades, and while there are definitely some notable changes across its main modes, particularly in Dynasty, the sheen of the franchise coming back from the dead has started to show its wear and tear.

The gameplay continues a largely positive trend toward complete micro-control over your team that persists across both the college and Madden games, but the entire package provides only marginal new reasons to play this entry over either of the versions that came before it.

"There are no unique challenges for any mascot."

When you boot up EA Sports College Football 27, after national champion and “Google Me” speaker Curt Cignetti greets you with a wink and an “EA Sports, it’s in the game,” you’re dropped into what is an already familiar selection of modes. The foundational modes are the same as they’ve always been: Road to Glory for your create-a-character, Road to the CFP for online progression, Dynasty for your team-building simulator, and Ultimate Team for card collecting and predatory pay-to-win scenarios.

Of course, the exception this year is the addition – or, rather, the return – of Mascot Mashup, undoubtedly the most famous and asked-about feature from the originals that hadn’t been brought forward to the new era just yet.

Just like in its past iterations, Mascot Mashup is effectively just a glorified Quick Play option with the players all swapped out for eleven 99-Overall copies of whichever mascot you choose and who perform some goofy animations as they come to the line of scrimmage before the snap. While it’s great to get a long-requested mode back into the game, my reaction to its inclusion quickly turned from excitement to a resounding, “That’s it?” Of the 120 mascots included in the mode, ten of them are unlocked from the get-go with the rest locked behind the remarkable challenge of winning one single Play Now game with that team.

It’s the same for every mascot. Every single one. There are no unique challenges for any mascot, no mascots that are more difficult to unlock than any other, and no respite from having to play dozens and dozens of individual Play Now games to unlock everything the mode has to offer (unless, of course, you dish out the $150 for the MVP+ subscription that unlocks all mascots for you). There are also no announcers for these matchups and no opportunities to play anything other than a straight-up Quick Play game, particularly disappointing given that there was a tournament option all the way back in NCAA Football 14.

It’s also still confusing to me that there are no differences in the ratings for any of the mascots, especially because the “even teams” option already exists. This could be the ultimate “who would win in a fight” fantasy, and yet the Leprechauns of Notre Dame are somehow right on par with apex predators like Buster Bronco from Boise State or Big Red from Western Kentucky.

It’s a nitpick of a casual mode, for sure, but this all gives a barebones feeling to what is ostensibly the most notable addition to the game, like it was included out of necessity rather than because it added anything meaningful to the overall experience. There’s a ton of opportunity here to create more of a system for progression and use this as a reason to try out different game modes or situations, but as it stands it’s more of a novelty that brings back fond memories of older games than something that makes any strides forward compared to the version that came out over a decade ago.

"Just like in its past iterations, Mascot Mashup is effectively just a glorified Quick Play option"

With Mascot Mashup the only new mode, the adjustments made to existing content are held to higher scrutiny. While this does mean that small hiccups, like continued common broadcasting misnomers or play art staying on screen for too long, become increasingly frustrating, the game largely succeeds in incrementally improving the experience across the board. The biggest changes lie within Dynasty, where the addition of Dynasty Points and the inclusion of new Blueprints make legitimately interesting changes to how you have to approach and prepare for each season.

Dynasty Points serve as the equivalent of your team’s financial strength, allowing you to hire staff, invest in facilities or program upgrades, and most importantly, fund the NIL deals that so heavily influence recruits and transfers. With more success and brand awareness comes more funding, meaning that the blue bloods of college football like Alabama and Georgia have even more of an immediate leg up than smaller power conference teams or mid-majors, further mirroring the real-life impact that money has had on the college game.

Your Dynasty Blueprint, then, is the structure through which you allocate and spend your Dynasty Points, segmenting them by costs for Staff, Facilities, NIL for Recruits, and NIL for existing players. If you want to focus on Talent Acquisition, for example, you’ll put more of your Dynasty Points into NIL money, while if you’re focused on player development, you’ll have to spend more on the Staff and Facilities to foster that growth.

Dynasty Points add a significant wrinkle to the Dynasty experience, effectively complementing recruiting hours as another resource you have to manage but across a longer time horizon. Your week-to-week recruiting cycle relies just as heavily on how much NIL money you are willing to commit to a player as it does on the number of hours you spend trying to sway them. Each player, whether they’re a recruit or already on your roster, has an expectation of how much NIL money they will receive, and offering below that amount will significantly impact their interest in your school, potentially even influencing existing players to transfer. Some players will be happy to receive any NIL money at all, but as the recruits get better, so do their financial expectations.

At the same time, though, the game errs on the side of being overly transparent with its new system, showing you exactly what a recruit is expecting and how much your offer will influence them one way or the other. The rest of the menu-heavy recruiting cycle remains nearly identical, though recruits can now verbally commit to a school while still considering the rest of their top 3 and you have more control over the players’ practice schedules to reduce the wear on their bodies. The only on-field change is the inclusion of the Coach Mode, which puts you solely as the playcaller and allows you to watch from the sidelines as the game simulates based on what you call.

The other significant new content is the addition of three new positions for Road to Glory: Tight End, Edge Rusher, and Free Safety. With eight total positions now, you’re increasingly able to home in on your particular brand of football, and it allows you to again play through your high school journey with specific weekly objectives to impress certain coaches or programs. My primary character was a 3-star Free Safety working to get into one of the big Power 4 schools, ultimately landing at UCF.

Aside from the new positions, much of the Road to Glory experience is the same, for better and for worse. It’s still great to see your full rise to stardom through the high school and college process, though it remains weird that a high school tight end or safety is calling plays and that you can game the system to help you out, such as an objective to not allow a rushing touchdown being achievable by allowing a long passing touchdown. Quirks aside, though, Road to Glory gives a great opportunity to play different positions and think through the game differently than when you’re controlling everyone at once.

The changes to Ultimate Team and Road to the CFP are less evident, even though the game clearly pushes you to play the cash-grab Ultimate Team first, introducing you with almost insultingly simple tutorials like “Call a pass play” that get you your first hint of the purposefully addictive pack opening mechanic and hope that you’ll ultimately give them more money to continue doing so.

With virtually no significant changes, Ultimate Team remains a highly predatory pay-to-win mode that feels almost built to get you stuck, placing store buttons on every page and requiring you to travel through multiple levels of slow-loading menus to get anywhere. With so few upgrades, too, the flaws that could be easily overlooked rear their heads, like text layers that frequently overlap and broadcasting annoyances that equate your Ultimate Team with the real-life team whose stadium you adopt.

"The other significant new content is the addition of three new positions for Road to Glory: Tight End, Edge Rusher, and Free Safety."

All the modes serve as pathways to get on the field, and the gameplay maintains the slow positive trajectory that it and Madden have been on for years. While it’s true that CFB and Madden feel distinctly college and professional, respectively, in how the former emphasizes a faster pace and big plays while the latter calls for more strategic maneuvering, the two experiences quickly coalesce. Improvements to last year’s Madden, such as a more direct impact of weather on players, all make their way here as well.

The gameplay is undeniably as fun and responsive as it’s ever been, giving you as much control as ever over pre-play and mid-play adjustments. For example, defensive secondary coverage has significantly more detail this year, providing not just the ability to press or back off, but also to adjust individual depth, shift zone placements, or give universal instructions to be more or less aggressive to the ball. I also appreciate the tweaks made to give you more control over how your secondary responds when a play breaks down and the ability to more easily change coverage assignments on the fly when you want to double team an opposing star receiver.

With that said, though, the increased micro-control over every aspect of your team exemplifies the asymptotic rise to complete football realism without adding that much to the experience itself. As much as I appreciate being able to shift my slot corner’s positioning on his receiver down to the foot, I struggle to believe that so many small adjustments provide enough new material to warrant a full-price new release, especially considering the ways it often pushes you to continue spending even when you’re already in.

With EA now putting out two football games a year with College Football and Madden and synchronizing many gameplay tweaks across both, there is even less of a reason to upgrade on a year-to-year basis, especially if you’re an annual player of either or both games, and CFB 27 feels like another point on a consistent but slow-moving line graph rather than an exciting or refreshing new entry to the franchise.

Like a 3-yard run on 2nd & 9, EA Sports College Football 27 makes some moves in the right direction but fails to create something more impactful. The on-field gameplay continues to add micro-improvements to give you control over every detail of your team both before and during a play, and it looks and feels as strong as it ever has.

With those minor upgrades, though, comes an expectation of materially new content, which CFB 27 largely lacks. As the first new mode since the franchise’s revival, Mascot Mashup feels hastily-made, with a tedious grind and fewer options than in its previous form. While Dynasty and Road to Glory have some changes that alter how you can play, the overall experience feels like it’s moving glacially forward, putting out annual entries at a pace that technically improves it but hardly warrants a new release. While annual fans and football junkies like me will appreciate some of the nuanced tweaks, CFB 27 needs more than just marginal improvements to make a real statement.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.