NHL 11
EA Sports
PS3, Xbox 360
ESRB rating: Everyone 10+ for Mild Violence
System reviewed on: Xbox 360
The NHL season officially kicks off this Thursday, and hockey fans looking for a way to live out their dreams via their videogame consoles don’t have too much to agonize over this time around.
If you’re a Wii owner looking for an authentic NHL experience, you’ve got NHL 2K11 from 2K Sports. If you’re a PS3 or Xbox 360 owner, you’ve got NHL 11 from EA sports. There’s no crossover between the two games this year.
Despite not having any serious competition on the Xbox 360 or PS3, NHL 11 doesn’t disappoint. Aside from the actual playability, which we’ll get to in a minute, the sheer amount of depth is almost overwhelming. You’ve got the standard games, season mode, tournament mode, playoff mode, Be A Pro mode, Be A GM mode, the all-new Hockey Ultimate Team mode, and more.
Hockey Ultimate Team
Hockey Ultimate Team is a total time suck (and potential money suck) for die-hard hockey fans. You build your own team from the ground up and play in month-long seasons against other Hockey Ultimate Team owners or the CPU.
As you progress, you earn EA Pucks for various achievements, which can be exchanged for card packs that can be used to upgrade your team. While you’re able to earn cards over time the old-fashioned way, you can alternatively spend your own money—real money—on card packs from the in-game store. Trading cards with online players is an option as well.
This new mode adds an addictive, RPG-type element to the game that ought to easily keep armchair GM’s happily occupied for quite some time.
Other Modes
Be A GM mode and Be A Pro mode are similar to previous years’ efforts, allowing you to run your favorite NHL franchise for up to 25 years in the case of the Be A GM mode, or create your own player in Be A Pro mode.
I actually spent most of my time in the Be A Pro mode. You create your character and choose your position, then work your way through the Canadian Hockey League’s round-robin Memorial Cup tournament as a junior player. Play well enough throughout the tournament, and you’ll get snatched up quickly during the NHL draft. You then play out your career at your given position, building experience points that you can use to improve your persona’s skills along the way.
On The Ice
While the game’s already-nice overall look hasn’t been drastically overhauled, there’s a new real-time physics engine, a new face-off system, hip checks, broken sticks, and a slew of other, more minor additions.
The new physics engine makes for some downright unbelievable gameplay. Each player on the ice seems to move around just a little bit differently than the next, body checks take on all different shapes, sizes, and severity, and each of your AI teammates and opponents literally seems to have a mind of his own. On more than one occasion, I found myself saying, “Wow, I’ve seen that happen in a real hockey game but I’ve never seen it in a video game.”
Case in point: I took a slapshot from the blue line, the puck hit the crossbar, and popped up in the air above the goal. I watched as my AI teammate skated over next to the goalie, lifted his stick up to about shoulder level, and tapped the puck into the net out of mid-air—all in one fluid motion.
The refs then stopped to review the goal, at which point they found that my teammate hadn’t lifted his stick high enough to get called for high sticking. All this information was relayed to me by the AI announcers, who remarked that my teammate knew exactly how high he could lift his stick without getting penalized. Consider the series of events—from a purely programming perspective—that have to trigger one another for that to happen.
The new broken sticks feature fits into the game reasonably well, though it almost seems like EA purposely went heavy on the stick snapping in order to make sure that everybody noticed it. It’s cool to be able to kick passes to your teammates but sometimes it’s not immediately apparent that you’ve broken your stick, so you end up skating around and wondering why you can’t take possession of the puck in order to shoot it. You can skate up next to a teammate and take his stick or skate by your own bench to be handed a new one, which is cool. The feature works well, though I’m not exactly sure EA needed to tout it as one of the main new features this year.
And so we finally get to the most basic, yet most important part; playing the actual game. All the features, game modes, and under-the-hood enhancements aside, NHL 11 has become my new favorite game.
I’m probably an easier sell since EA’s NHL series, in general, occupied most of my video-game-playing life from middle school until present day, but I can honestly say that playing NHL 11 made me worry that I was going to wear my own thumbprints off. I couldn’t put it down.
Everything is pretty close to perfect. Thanks in no small part to the overhauled physics engine, manipulating the left analog stick almost makes it seem like you’re actually skating—the symbiosis between your player on the screen and your own left thumb is a wonderfully strange experience. Using the right analog stick to shoot, deke, and body check is almost as satisfying.
The audio, too, is spot on. Commentary from Gary Thorne and Bill Clement is seamless, timely, and appropriate—light years ahead of EA’s own Madden NFL franchise. It even rivals commentary from 2K Sports’ various titles. I’d give 2K Sports titles the edge across the board for inserting more natural-sounding dialogue, but EA pulls off a fine performance with NHL 11.
Aside from the commentary, crowd noise is perfectly triggered and varied depending on the specific situation as well. And you’ll hear your own teammates calling for the puck, alerting you to being offsides, and telling you to shoot. The entire aural and visual presentation absolutely enhances the game overall, making everything feel very immersive.
Improvements?
There are some areas for improvement, however. For starters, it’d be nice to be able to custom assign controller buttons. There’s a “custom control” setting in the options menu, but it doesn’t allow you to map certain buttons to certain actions. Come again? I like using the right analog stick to shoot, but I don’t like having to use the right trigger to pass.
As for passing, you have to hold the right trigger down a little longer to register a more forceful pass and since the right trigger is a bit mushier than all the other buttons, it makes one of the more important aspects of hockey—passing—a bit dicey at times. EA has implemented “classic controls” as an option which moves the passing functions to the A button, but when playing with the classic controls, you lose the ability to control several other functions that are normally present under the default control scheme.
Some of the backend menus are a bit buggy and/or inconsistent, too. Some menus have a back button, some don’t (yet you still have to press a certain button to go back to the previous menu), and some back buttons take you back two menus. Navigating, in general, just isn’t all that intuitive. Also, certain season mode option changes don’t always lock in correctly, forcing you to change them manually before you start each game.
Overall
Small nitpicks aside, NHL 11 flexes some serious muscle this year. The game itself plays like butter and there are enough different modes to keep just about anyone happy. Those who own last year’s version face a mildly philosophical question about whether or not this year’s new features justify shelling out another $60, but the new physics engine and gameplay enhancements alone make it a worthwhile purchase before even considering the new Hockey Ultimate Team mode and broken sticks.
For all other semi-serious NHL fans, it’s a must-buy.
Techland Score: 9.5 out of 10
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