This games is straight up terrible and not for the classic "same thing as always" reasons. Ultimately what do people expect? It's football. It won't change much over time. The one thing about a football game that should get better though is player physics and AI intelligence.

And well.. The AI and throwing mechanics are simply horrific. The bullet vs touch vs lob pass controls are extremely inconsistent, or if they aren't inconsistent they are so precise that it feels like you're playing more of a rhythm game than a football game.

Meanwhile as you struggle to comprehend how to correctly throw a pass the way you want at any given moment the AI is terrible. Your guys will just consistently blow their routes on offense. Meanwhile the defensive AI is capable of basically immediately getting to every ball they possibly can. Worse yet there seems to be some unexplained or just bad programming on receivers where they drop or have passes knocked loose extraordinary often. Even if they are passes that would otherwise be caught with ease, even while contacted in the NFL.

Awful game and physics mechanics make what should be the most fun part of football at best complete boring, at worse extremely frustrating. Dropping back to pass feels like a crap shoot every time.

It is night and day playing this game vs FC24. FC24 isn't perfect but the actual games feel fun and like they've got a high skill ceiling, this is a dice roll.

Very fun game so far. Does a better job than past FromSoftware games at easing the player into the world and combat style. Some hardcore or dedicated fans may not like this but I found it refreshing as a way to get my feet under me. The world and level design is beautiful with some varied and interesting characters thus far. The difficulty scaling of enemies is well balanced and as usual they don't hold your hand too much which gives you a real chance to learn and grow at your own pace. It's really fun to finally nail how a mechanic works after you fight someone and lose a few times.

Adding the open world and a few more classical RPG elements is a nice change of pace and adds something new to their repertoire of past game designs.


I have a Ryzen 9 3900, 32GB of RAM, and a RTX 3060TI and the game lurches pretty hard at times. So far it has not happened in combat or any critical moments but I'll be walking through the world and suddenly my framerate will drop to 50% of what it was for a few seconds. Installing the game on an SSD may help. However the load times from fast travel or initial boot are still relatively quick and in some instances these lurches last longer than the actual loading screens. (If the loading screen takes 5 seconds, the lurch last 7-10) Overall they aren't game breaking, I'm still having a lot of fun but the optimization could be better.

Additionally I did experience a game breaking bug where the cut scene to get your maiden never loaded for me. So I spent quiet a bit of time running around unable to level up or get my horse; since you must accept her accord to get these abilities. I had rested at more than the 3-4 Graces needed to get this. Upon rebooting the game, I rested and immediately received this cut scene which fixed everything.

Those things aren't deal breakers for me, I still have a positive outlook on the game after about 3 hours played last night. However if those kind of things bother you, hold off if you're someone poking through reviews now on release day wanting to know if you should grab this game or not.