My friends and I haven’t stopped playing this game since it came out.
There’s no actual football gameplay. But building up a team to become an unstoppable multi-decade dynasty is incredibly fun. The game is simple enough to be easy to get into and complex enough to make mastering it feel within reach.
When you start out, you simply choose your school. Most big name schools are there simply because they’re named after states. Michigan, Texas, Oregon, Tennessee, and others all make appearances. But you can pick the school closest to yours and simply rename it if your school of choice isn’t there.
And then, you go.
You’ve got a team that you can change the line up for. You’ve got your schedule in front of you. If you play your cards right, you’ve got a conference championship and maybe the playoffs ahead of you as well.
You can look at each school’s roster to see which players you should watch out for. You can scout to see how many passing and rushing yards a team’s offense averages to prepare a defensive scheme. You can check how many passing and rushing yards they let up to come up with an offensive scheme. You can ignore those and simply tailor your schemes to your team’s strengths rather than the opponent’s weaknesses. You can set your lineup to get a freshman some more playing time in the hopes that they improve more over the year. And then you play through the season game by game.
After a season is over, you go into recruiting. You’re given a budget (we’ll assume for scholarships, not for paying off players), and you’re shown the positions your team is lacking in. You can look through players of each position or go to the Top 100 players overall.
Each player has 5 ratings. An overall rating, a potential rating, and then three determined by their position. For example, a quarterback will have pass strength, accuracy, and evasion. A Safety on the other hand, will have coverage, speed, and tackling. You can pick up the best players or players with high potential to see if they pay off more later on. You get to watch your players improve as they go from their freshman year to their senior year. Some will improve more than others based on playing time and their potential rating.
Spend your recruiting money wisely and be sure to budget because any positions not filled through recruiting will be filled with walk on players who are almost always much worse than the majority of potential recruits. And after recruiting, the whole thing starts all over again with the next season.
The game also features built in easy modes and hard modes based on a school’s Prestige. Each school starts with a predetermined Prestige rating which is then lowered or raised based on whether or not you beat your rival and whether or not you surpassed your team’s expectations or fell short. For a team with high prestige, you’ll probably need to win 11 or 12 games per season to beat expectations. Meanwhile a team with low prestige will meet expectations just by getting a few wins, and anything more will be seen as impressive.
A school like Alabama starts with a Prestige rating of 95, meaning your automatically generated players will be better, your potential recruits will be better, and you’ll have more money to recruit them with so you can get more of them. Alabama is something of an easy mode.
On the other end of the spectrum is Phoenix which has a Prestige rating of 45. You can imagine the difference. Simply everything about your team is worse. You’ll have a tough time getting many wins and building up your prestige.
And then, for the masochistic out there, there is American Samoa. For every other school in the game, 45 is the lowest possible Prestige rating. American Samoa starts at 25 and can go on down to 0. Winning 0 games as American Samoa is meeting expectations. Of course, that means you lose to your rival, so your Prestige will still go down. It’s a difficult and fun challenge to see how quickly you can get American Samoa to a national championship, but this is definitely the hardest school to play as.
Here’s the thing: the game’s design lends itself to playing several seasons all in a row once you get into it. When you save a game, it saves at the beginning of your current season. You can’t save halfway through. You can’t save and recruit later. If you save, you start at the beginning of the season when you load it back up no matter what. So in each play session, you have to at least play a full season and recruit before you save again. This isn’t a big deal because everything goes so quickly. Scouting, setting schemes, and playing a game takes only a few taps once you know what you’re doing.
But for my friends and I, once we’re through a season and recruiting, we really want to see how those recruits do. So we’ll play another season. And recruit more. And then we want to know how those recruits will do. And it repeats itself until we realize it’s been 2 hours and we have things to do in real life. But the game is so much fun that spending so much time going through seasons and comparing player stats that it definitely doesn’t feel like wasted time.
Now, the game is not without flaws. It uses NFL overtime instead of college overtime. There is no redshirting. If we’re being honest, the Conservative offensive scheme is extremely overpowered. There are many more complaints, but all of these things are very minor. And in addition to that, the developer has been extremely active on the subreddit, taking note of bug complaints, feature requests, and more. The dev keeps a to-do list on the subreddit’s sidebar so that everyone can see what will be coming soon.
Once the small issues are ironed out and the offensive schemes are a little more balanced, this game will be a 10/10 for me. For now though, those small complaints knock it down to a 9. This game is a must have for any big college football fan. It makes the off season a lot more bearable.