(I'm french but my review is in english so you Big Ant people get my message)

"As a big fan of rugby and rugby games, I wanted to give Rugby 25 a chance given the progress made since the early access phase, and despite the majority of negative reviews.

I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but my disappointment is still huge considering the gameplay experience I’ve just had.

First, the positives:

- It's clear that effort has been put into the graphics quality and animations.
- The number of teams available is staggering.
- The game itself simulates rugby correctly on many points, and the action can be fluid and almost realistic once you start mastering the basic controls, like simple or directed passes.
- Overall, the foundations seem solid at first glance.
- Frequent updates from the developers are a message that the team is dedicated to improving the product

But...

Where it hurts:

- The rucks are poorly managed in the sense that it seems almost impossible to win a turnover, even when you have 2 or 3 more players than the opponent. And when, by chance, you win a contest, it’s hard to understand why or to prevent one of your players from doing a pick & go at that moment instead of calmly retrieving the ball with the nine. It's extremely frustrating because it gives a feeling of helplessness.
- Numerous offside calls against me when I have the ball and am attacking. WHY ??
- Many offside calls after the ruck, because my player is automatically put in that position as soon as I press A to take possession.
- Many rugby rules are either not considered or seem to be bugged.
- Grounding the ball in your own in-goal after entering it = goaline dropkick for the defense instead of a 5-meter scrum for the attack.
- I managed to execute a 50-22, but the opponent gets the ball to throw in the lineout.
- No player repositioning in terms of normal positioning of forwards and backs.
Instead of keeping the forwards around the ruck like in real life, players don't reposition, which can lead to situations where your right prop ends up on the wing facing a winger, whether on defense or attack.
- Overall, AI players react with a big delay, whether it's with:
Defensive lines
Support runs
Ruck clear-outs (3 players floating around instead of coming into the ruck, despite me repeatedly pressing the B button).
- Numerous stability bugs.
Soft lock on a lineout that doesn't trigger, forcing me to quit and restart the match in career mode.
Crashes (at least 2 in 5 hours).
- Useless kicking gameplay.
- The UX is really not great.
We can't even save changes to the team lineup or arrange the squad to sort players by position, so we don’t have to spend 15 minutes looking for players to put on the match sheet.
- The player fitness management is quite ridiculous in career mode:
Players take 3 weeks to get back to full fitness after playing a match, as if that were the case in real life.
This creates situations where after 3 or 4 matches, all your players are half-dead before the match even begins.

All this to say that despite my desire to support this game and Big Ant's effort, the disappointment with the state of the game and the frustrating experience I had led me to request a refund, and this is the first time this has happened to me on steam. I will go back to Rugby 22 if I want to have fun and will wait a few months before trying Rugby 25 again, and only if it's on sale. At $49.99, I’m sorry but it’s definitely not worth it."

I have had the game on early access, and have played it mostly on my steam deck.

I more or less give it a go daily - awaiting the Tuesday update for improvements. The early access was a challenge to play, but I had to finish a season of URC.

With the full release and subsequent updates things have improved. As I really love a good rugby game - I feel the redant team are taking the community comments into account and trying to improve the game. Currently I am playing on the highest difficulty.

What does need improving are:

1) scrums - they seem almost impossible to win on offence - might be a steam deck issue- but so far I have won many 3% of any scrum I have

2) offside penalty for forward passes - I’ve noticed this happens a lot in running play - especially with offloads.

3) the new stamina changes in difficulty - I hate it - nothing worse than breaking the line and your wing gets caught by a prop. Nevermind for any type of player - if the opposition is faster - ok fine - but not because his stamina runs out. Perhaps game sliders like in Madden could be applied to difficulty settings, meaning if you want to remove this , but enjoy other aspects of the difficulty settings, then you can.

4) high tackle - this does in some way mimick the frustrations of watching rugby today - where a high tackle can come from now where. But in the game you genuinely don’t know if your player will commit it or not, and then face a ban at the end of the match. In past games there were two tackle buttons - standard and hard tackle - standard could mean your opponent breaks the tackle - but no penalty, whereas hard tackle means the opposite.

5)rucks - there must be a way to bind more players to the ruck in order to win or lose the ruck - this is a fundamental of rugby - not enough players at the ruck can cost you possession. Also the speed at which the players arrive can be frustratingly slow.

6) mauls have very little impact - although here you have the ability to bind several players to it. Suggest more effect of a maul here, and the ability for the opposition to collapse it.

7) kicking - there needs to be a better pointer for the kicking - it’s too random and quite hard to pinpoint where you will kick.

8) tackling a player over the try line - always results in the defending team holding it up. This should be changed.

9) camera angles - sideline view can be fun, but I find the angle to be too low - zooming out just gives you a worse view

Overall I will keep playing - I appreciate the changes that have been made so far. Also it is the ONLY rugby game you can play on steam deck.

I have played this game since early access, but I have come back and forth into it intermittently. So I have seen the progress as a series of jumps. While I see progress, pretty much all of the main issues are still there.

1. The AI - I am yet to actually see a difference between the ai difficulty levels other than they turn you over more (which seems to be pot luck whether a ruck will go well or not). Despite the devs saying that they've patched them always taking a scrum penalty, it still happens A LOT!

2. The Teams - It's great that there are so many teams in this game, but why the heck was this such a big focus of the dev teams resource when the gameplay has been so rubbish.

3. The gameplay:

Rucks - There is no skill here. whether you win or lose them seems entirely random despite their recent patch. The AI however, is a rucking genius even on easy. You can literally tackle the AI team behind the line and push them back down the pitch to their own 22 before they kick the ball away, and won't turn them over once. There is no mechanic for the first defender actually getting over the ball and turning it. There is no mechanic for the attacking team holding onto the ball and so no chance for any penalties in the ruck, which would massively improve the experience. I think it would also be a massive improvement if the passing options from the ruck had consistent button mapping (on the xbox controller A, B, Y and X often switch around so you can't plan an attack properly because you can't be 100% sure which player you're about to pass to).
Passing - Passing has massively improved but support runners still run odd lines. doesn't matter anyway as you can't get past a defender without running sideways in ways you never see in an actual game.
Scrums - They just don't work. they collapse all the time even if you get it right. even if I press to get the ball out, it doesn't always happen and the ref blows and I get stuck in a loop of never ending scrums collapsing and resetting.
Mauls - They have no purpose in the game at the moment. They're easy to push back but you can't win a scrum or penalty from them, and the AI passes straight away anyway.

General Play - Attacking is bland. it's just players passing in a line with no clear structure (despite a patch adding pods to the game). you can't have dummy runners behind the pods and the pods often aren't there anyway despite what the devs say. Just pass until the defender catches you. Hand offs and sidestepping are way too hard to do and barely ever work, but again the AI is a genius at these things!!

Rugby 22 had all of the mechanics that made a rugby game interesting, it just needed refining a bit. It had actual pod structures and set plays and was just better overall. That is what the devs should go back to and implement the mechanics from that game into this new one. This Idea of basing it on the rugby league games just has not worked.

I CERTAINLY DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS GAME CURRENTLY. I am happy to update this if or when I see it actually be worth buying for £45.