EA FC 25's new Rush format is better than Volta - but where's FIFA Street when you need it?
Hands on with the new "gameplay experience".
Alongside the many changes coming to FC 25, a big new addition is Rush, a format - EA Sports was keen to specify this is not technically a mode - playable across every actual mode within the game.
Rush is a 5v5 "gameplay experience" which replaces Volta, the old 5v5 mode that was ultimately a little underplayed. "The feedback we got from the community in Volta is that they felt like they were missing out on Ultimate Team, on Clubs, when they were going to Volta," senior producer Sam Rivera said. "People were not engaging as much as we initially thought, so we did a big exercise of 'learnings': what's happening with Volta, what are the numbers telling us, what's the community telling us?"
The result is Rush, and the change in how it's described by EA - as a "gameplay experience" rather than standalone mode - is the big hint here: Rush is available, in different forms, across Career Mode, Ultimate Team, Clubs (formerly Pro Clubs), and good old Kick Off, rather than being a separate thing on its own. In Career Mode that's primarily as a training ground experience for youth players, as we detailed in our big FC 25 preview earlier on; in Ultimate Team it's something you can play as an alternative means of earning rewards while still using your own FUT squad players; in Clubs, it's an additional way of playing as well as 11v11 matches - crucially, it doesn't replace the ability to play full-sized games.
To play it you'll need a team of four human players - the goalkeeper is always controlled by AI, penalties aside - with any additional slots matchmade if you're playing solo or short of a full squad. It's all "one pool" in matchmaking, as Clubs associate producer Tim Able told us, but you'll get a special match intro when you're up against a full opposing Club online to let you know you're in for a tougher match.
With Clubs in particular feeling quite closely linked to Rush, it's worth running through a few of the big changes coming there before getting into how it plays. First up, Clubs in general has gone through a bit of a spruce-up. It's now more of a "social hub", with a "clubhouse" decorated in your club's colours, mainly depicted as a changing room for your custom player, as well as for the players of your clubmates who drop in and out as they join you.
In other words, it's a fancy multiplayer lobby, but there's also an updated menu system (Able was keen to emphasise the developer's "play more, navigate less" mantra this year), which should make the whole experience a bit smoother, and a bit of work done on the metagame. Your Club Manager can now allocate a "budget" for club facility cards, which can offer a gameplay boost on the pitch. One example was certain facilities granting you a third Playstyle for your club's players - the preset boosts to things like a player's ability to score finesse shots or dribble with greater close control.
Back to Rush, and that ties into Clubs with a new currency - EA loves a currency - called RP, or Rush Points. This currency goes towards your player rank, and climbing through those ranks during the season grants you Club-focused rewards. Your Club also gets victory points for wins, with each season placing clubs on a global leaderboard with its own rewards, which seem to be primarily cosmetic and based around showing off how well you ranked.
How does Rush itself play? Short answer: it's more fun than Volta, but still no FIFA Street.
The key difference in comparing against Volta is that Rush doesn't really follow any specific indoor football rules, instead opting to be just slightly more playful with the formula. The action is faster, the game is more open, and consequences are, crucially, felt much faster as a result.
There's a new offside system, for instance, which means a player can now be offside, but only when they're in the final third of the pitch closest to the opposition goal. In playing it, that immediately created an interesting mind game around when to "step up" as a defender, and when to drop deeper towards your goal. The best forwards will be able to time their runs perfectly so the ball's played to them while they're still in the middle third, while the best defenders will ideally know when exactly to turn and start sprinting towards their own goal.
It also means losing the ball in midfield can be catastrophic if your teammates aren't smart - just like casual five-a-side in the real world, if you're a bit more tactically-minded that can often be a burden: you'll end up the only one who knows to drop deeper to stop a counter when the rest of the team all goes flying forwards during an attack. The flipside of course is that teams who communicate well and know their roles, or when to rotate with others (and there are no set positions at all in Rush) will naturally do better than those who try to wing it.
A few other fun rule tweaks are worth mentioning. There's a drop-in kick off, much the same as in the old FIFA Street where you need to rush to the ball in the middle of the pitch, and there are now Blue Cards, which work as a one-minute sin-bin for egregious fouls. There are no draws, with matches that are level at full time instead going to a golden goal in extra time, and penalties are different too. Like the cult-favourite US-style penalties of the 90s, it's now a one-on-one against the goalkeeper, with the captain taking on the ability to control the GK just in that moment.
All of this is good fun, and feels like a very slight move towards something a bit less straight-faced from a series that has been predominantly focused on the "simulation" approach for some time. But it did also make me wonder about my old friend FIFA Street, the wonderfully arcadey cult hit from the Ronaldinho- and Rooney-infused era of the early 2000s. Surely EA must have thought about it?
"We're always talking about ideas," Rivera told me. "A lot of the features you see in the game are not a 'one-year thing' - literally right now we're discussing things three years from now. So we're always open to things, however at this point the only thing I can say is that Rush is basically our foundation for social play, for small-sided, for years to come." That may be a coy way of saying: it's probably come up, like all things would, but don't expect anything there any time soon.
"We are very confident that with Rush we are solving some of the problems, some of the feedback that we hear from people that used to play Clubs, or people that used to play Volta," he continued. "We hear, for example, with Clubs, what we see in the data [is] that most people prefer to play as an attacker or as an attacking midfielder - because you're closer to the ball, it makes sense, you want to score the goals."
On the flipside, he said, playing as a defender in 11v11 meant you had to take fewer risks with the ball - because losing it can mean conceding a goal. "So right away, we see that tendency of being more attacking… in Rush we're solving that, with the fact that there's no positions and you just need to rotate, you're always close to the action."
At the same time, EA felt that the pitch for Volta was too small, requiring "a completely different approach to the mechanics of dribbling or shooting, and that really takes a lot of time, a lot of polish, to make it fun." The Rush pitch as a result is 230 percent larger than a Volta pitch, Riviera said, which in his words creates "a completely different experience."
Having played it, I would just about agree. Rush is snappier and more snackable, easier to dip into and out of for a more casual game when the concentration of a full-sized match feels like too much work, or when just a couple of friends are online. It's far more fluid, you're far more involved at all parts of the match, and importantly, it takes itself just a bit less seriously than Volta did. But it's still missing a bit of truly cartoonish action - because it's still no FIFA Street.
This preview is based on a trip to EA Sports in Vancouver. EA covered flights and accomodation.