EA Sports College Football 27 Review: Not Moving the Chains

2 weeks ago 17

Published Jul 7, 2026, 10:32 PM EDT

Ethan Krieger is an Editor at DualShockers, where he covers reviews, guides, lists, features, previews, interviews, and gaming news. He began writing professionally in 2017 as a sports writer before moving into games coverage with DualShockers in 2024.

Before joining DualShockers, Ethan wrote for the FanSided Sports Network, including 8 Points, 9 Seconds, where he covered the Indiana Pacers, and Pelican Debrief, where he covered the New Orleans Pelicans. His background in sports writing, editing, and content strategy now informs his approach to gaming coverage, especially around reviews, rankings, guides, and event reporting. Ethan studied English at Arizona State University, with a focus on writing and text editing.

Like every gamer/sports fan, I was part of the crowd that was absolutely elated to learn EA Sports was coming back to college football a couple of years ago. Upon release, I spent a lot of time with EA Sports College Football 25, and though I wasn't totally thrilled with every choice and decision the game made, it was still just great to have these titles back.

A couple of years later, it's now time for College Football 27, as summer is already whittling away, and the student athletes we root for and support will soon be back on campus before we know it. In the wake of Indiana's electric title run and being someone that lived in Bloomington watching it all unfold in person, I was more excited than ever to keep the CFB hype alive and hop into this season's video game.

And well, after spending enough time with the game to feel comfortable weighing in, I'm pretty mixed overall. On the field, 27 shines as some of the best football gaming action in recent memory, and I officially think I prefer it to Madden. This is great news. On the flipside, there's a lot surrounding the on-field action that I had issues with, several of which have been around since the franchise came back in 25.

Championship Details

Right when you fire up CFB 27, you're greeted with the iconic sounds of university marching bands blaring triumphantly in your ears, as well as the extraordinarily sharp new menu design that the team has whipped up this time around. It all looks and sounds awesome from a presentation perspective.

The music is the standout overall, with the EA Sports Marching Band playing not only classic university fight songs, but also fun covers of pop songs, like "Day N Nite" by Kid Cudi, "Levitating" by Dua Lipa, and even the '80s hit "Take On Me" by A-ha. This is a niche request, but I'd actually love to have this soundtrack on vinyl, and that's something I didn't expect when launching the game.

Everything from both a sound and visual presentation really is super good, and this extends to things like character and coach models, the little cutscenes before games, and the presentation of dozens of iconic college football stadiums. It's all just a little crisper, more polished, and overall impressive feeling from both previous games in this reboot.

Great On-Field Action

The strong visuals and audio presentation aren't the only standouts, however, as when you're actually on the field, actively playing football, I think the action is great. I know there are some that don't love the Frostbite engine, but the 3.0 version that CFB 27 is using feels very smooth and clean, creating an in-action football experience that I don't have too many gripes with yet.

It all looks and sounds awesome from a presentation perspective.

CFB 27 also does have a lot of little new tweaks to the actual gameplay this time around, including 25 new skills and gameplay ideas that have been deemed important enough to have dedicated training modules for. These all combine to create a whopping 140 skill trainer activities that the team has collected together, pointing to the gameplay of CFB 27 being deeper and more nuanced than ever.

I'm not a pro-level football video game player by any means, but I have played nearly every Madden game, tons of the old CFB titles, as well as both of these rebooted editions. In the age of football games being more sim-ish than the arcade games of old, CFB 27 is definitely one of the best in the gameplay department. I had several issues with Madden NFL 26 last year, and I'd already say I prefer playing CFB 27.

Still, there are some things I don't always love, like how RPOs have essentially turned into feeling like QTE-events, a noticeable issue when college ball is so dependent on these types of plays. At the same time, things like WR and RB screens feel awesome, and work way better than they do in Madden.

I'd also shoutout kick/punt returns, which feel stale in other games, but just have something electric-feeling about them in CFB 27. I can't quite put my finger on it, I just know I'm enjoying returning kicks more than ever before.

Everything else, for the most part in terms of gameplay, as perhaps minorly tweaked and iterated upon as it is, feels pretty familiar, and that's not a bad thing. CFB has been fun to play since it came back in 25, and that remains true here when you're actively calling and executing plays.

Game Modes Already Feeling Bloated, Stale, and Questionable

And then there are EA Sports College Football 27's actual game modes, which is where I start to have some complaints. As you'd expect by now, it's once again Ultimate Team, Road to Glory, and Dynasty. The only additional thing is Mascot Mashup, the return of being able to play 11v11 with iconic CFB mascots. The only problem is that only 10 out of 120 mascots are unlocked, with the other 110 only being selectable after you win a real game with their respective team. That's not a hard unlock requirement, but that's still an insane grind for no reason.

If you've played any EA Sports game for years at this point, you know the premise of Ultimate Team, the card collecting, loot-box-feeling arm of the game that features far too many instances of encouraging buying packs and in-game currencies with micro-transactions. I'm not going to get on my soapbox here, but this mode is just not for me. I know it's popular with enough people to remain in these games, and if you're a fan, Ultimate Team is still Ultimate Team (but more on how it performs later in this review).

By a margin, Road to Glory and Dynasty have been the most interesting modes to me since EA CFB returned. In Road to Glory, you create a high school player, complete some objectives during your senior year, and field offer letters from universities depending on how you perform. Once at a school, you fight your way up the depth chart, negotiate NIL deals, take timed pop quizzes from your coaches (featuring questions you'd have no reason to realistically know based on your gameplay), decide whether to skip practice for a party (don't), and ultimately see where your college career ends up and what your NFL draft projection looks like in the end.

There are cool things along the way, like a hat ceremony when you pick your school, as well as a new Heisman Trophy award show. Running the ball is my favorite thing in these games, so I created an RB based on Todd Gurley's college archetype before deciding to attend Duke, because I wanted the fun of helping a typically irrelevant college program to glory, much like IU has done in recent years. It's just more fun.

And well, this mode can be enjoyable. It can also just feel like it's taking far too long to progress, and is also too hung up on arbitrary or tedious little bits and pieces to be engaging. Practice mini-games can either be kind of fun, or the complete opposite, and borderline unwinnable. These are also the games you'll play for your position battles on the depth chart, so you better hope the RNG is kind and you roll friendly mini-games.

Aside from this stuff, managing people hitting up your cell phone is boring, and the whole thing can just feel like it's taking too long to get anywhere. This includes improving your stats and earning dozens of available abilities, but of course, you can put some more real money into the game to level up quicker if you'd like.

In addition to the previous positions you could play as, 27 has also added TE, EDGE, and FS. This is cool, but most of us will still play as a QB or RB and have about the same experience as always. The other positions are too infrequently and inconsistently engaging to really be worth the time sink. It's all hardly any different from 25 or 26, which is too bad, because the premise of Road to Glory has the potential to be much more interesting than what we're now continually getting.

And then there's Dynasty, the mode most of us missed in the absence of the old CFB games and pined for longingly until EA Sports brought it back to us. Now that it's here and being iterated upon in the modern games, I... kind of just miss the old games more. Dynasty Mode in CFB 27, along with all its new additions, is now just starting to feel bloated and like it's asking far too much of you.

There's so much here that it's starting to feel like the football equivalent of an RPG as deep as Baldur's Gate 3. And while you might think that sounds exciting, it really all just ends up feeling like a chore. Between school athletic director expectations, facility management, NIL negotiations, recruiting, choosing the practice plan for every single player on the roster, upgrading and unlocking a staggering number of coaching abilities, thinking about budgets and staffing, and genuinely more... I dunno. I kind of just want to play football myself.

Road to Glory has the potential to be much more interesting than what we're now continually getting.

If you're into all this, that's awesome. And to be sure, you don't have to do all this if you don't want to. The game allows you to toggle on and off certain Dynasty aspects. But even when toggled off, they still show up on your weekly to-do list, almost as if to say "Hey, this is still here. Come spend hours making sense of this head coach skill tree that's in a football game for some reason."

It just feels bloated, even if you try to streamline it down, and I'm just not super interested in spending much time in it, which is a shame with how many seasons I used to sim in CFB games on the PS2, and still would have a blast doing so. Ultimately, I'm finding myself most interested in just playing random exhibition games, or unlocking more mascots, because I'm just not really sure what else to do when everything else is either kind of disengaging, or far too bogged down.

A Patch or Two Away

At times, EA Sports College Football 27 is also still rough around the edges. This is seen most glaringly in Ultimate Team. It has consistent performance hiccups, like card art not populating, images not showing up, entire menus not loading, tabs not scrolling, and more. It crashed my console once. It froze another time. I had to back out of the mode entirely and go back in several times just to get it to function at all.

There's also text hanging off the bottom of text boxes, like the writer ran out of space and just said "Screw it" instead of editing the format, or white text on white backgrounds that you can't even read. Today, I noticed a half gigabyte patch for the game, so I popped back into Ultimate Team to see if anything was remedied, and it wasn't.

Outside of Ultimate Team, CFB 27 is sadly still not blemish free. In general, many menus move slowly, prompting repeated button inputs just to get where I'm trying to go. There are also minor things, like selecting a play, and then seeing the minimized on-field screen going full screen and stuttering a bit in the process.

Additionally, there are still weird instances that have been present in the older games of commentary straight up not matching the on-field action. This happened several times in my very first game. For example, I scored a touchdown to go up by 8, and the announcer stated, "Here's the extra point to put them up by a field goal." Uhh, nope. After that, I kicked off to my opponent, and he exclaimed, "Let's see what they can get going after that deep punt." Again, no sir.

Another time, Curt Cignetti's mouth was just perpetually gaping wide open, like he was at the dentist with the hygienist continually asking, "Can you open a little wider, please?" Again, this doesn't affect the action on field, but it all starts to add up, too.

At times, EA Sports College Football 27 is also still rough around the edges.

The bane of my existence in 25 and 26 was unskippable cutscenes before and during the game action, and those are still here. For example, in Road to Glory, every single game starts with a view of your player running onto the field, a cheerleader doing a side flip, and your coach hyping up the team in a huddle. It all takes a full minute, and you can never skip it. Why would I want to watch this same exact thing over and over and over? It's a silly quality of life thing to complain about, but it's sillier that we're forced to look at it every time, like Alex strapped to a chair with his eyelids peeled open at the end of A Clockwork Orange.

When I had similar issues in CFB 25, I think I overlooked a lot of them because I was simply excited these games were back, and I was willing to give a lot of grace as everyone got their feet back under them. But now, it's been three years, and it's getting a little hard to keep sweeping everything under the rug. It's time to expect a little more, and CFB 27 feels like it's already getting a bit redundant.

EA Sports College Football 27 is fun to play when you're actually on the field and engaging with the game, but there's too much going on off the field to look past anymore. It's a patch or two away from running as it should, and peppered with quirks and inconsistencies that should've been ironed out by now. Dynasty Mode, on the other hand, is already feeling bloated, and Road to Glory is doing nothing to improve itself from previous games. It's a shame, because the game is fun to pick up and play, but it also feels like CFB is already coasting.

Released July 9, 2027

ESRB Everyone / Users Interact, In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items)

Pros & Cons

The on-field action is better than ever
Really cool menu and music presentation
Consistently fun when you're actually playing football
Visuals look really nice

Really needs a patch or two to get it where it needs to be (Ultimate Team particularly is in rough shape)
Unskippable, repetitive scenes
Most modes feel uninspired, bloated, or bland
Frequent silly oversights, like announcers saying nonsensical remarks
Already feels like the franchise has stalled

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