It’s the most wonderful time of the year….
No, it’s not Christmas time already. It’s the beginning of hockey season, when the long three month stretch following the end of the Stanley Cup Finals is finally over, the players return to the ice, and the new hockey video games are released to hungry hockey fans everywhere. This hockey season is met with even more anticipation than usual, given that Sega promised a hockey game that would eclipse even its own superlative NHL 2K3, easily the best hockey game released for the 2002-2003 season. That game had the best gameplay of any modern hockey game, but lacked the presentation quality that made Electronic Arts’ NHL games so popular over the years.
With ESPN NHL Hockey, however, all that was about to change. Not only does ESPN NHL Hockey retain all of the rock-solid gameplay the was present in NHL 2K3, but it couples it with a presentation that is the closest to a television broadcast feel as any hockey game has ever come. Top it all off with play-by-play by ESPN hockey commentators Gary Thorne and Bill Clement (best known for calling the action during the Stanley Cup playoffs for the past several years), and you have a hockey experience that will be tough to beat by any of this season’s contenders. True, ESPN NHL Hockey is not without its problems, as one would expect from a franchise in just its fourth season, but ESPN NHL Hockey truly proves that Sega is serious about making hockey on the PlayStation 2 as exciting, if not more so, than hockey on television.
In the spectrum of hockey games, with arcade at one end and simulation on the other, ESPN NHL Hockey is almost all the way on the simulation end; while a few liberties are taken to ensure the game is playable, the game plays almost exactly as it does in real life. Therefore, passes don’t always hit their mark, checked and checking players don’t recover instantaneously, and it takes real set-up in order to get a goal past the goalie. Similarly, there is no “on fire” or “gamebreakers” or anything else that can’t be found in a real hockey game, so the experience is as close to playing a real hockey game as you can get without putting the integrity of your dental work in jeopardy.
What is new in this year’s version, however, is a feature called The SkyBox, similar to a toned down version of The Crib found in Sega’s ESPN NFL Football. In the SkyBox, you can play a quick game of air hockey, view your personal accomplishments, and unlock various extras like vintage jerseys, rinks, and mini-games. You earn the points for unlockables by completing various in-game tasks, like getting five assists in a game, or getting a hat trick. The problem with this system is that there are several levels of tasks, and you can’t advance to a level until you’ve completed the level before it. Now, this wouldn’t be so bad if level one didn’t include tasks like “Win 60% of a season’s games on Pro difficulty”. Given the amount of time one must invest just to pass level one, it’s likely that, for all but the most fanatic of players, most of the extras will remain behind closed doors, which somewhat defeats the whole purpose of the system. (It should be noted that EA included a similar system of tasks and rewards in its NHL games for the past several years, but allowed tasks at any difficulty level to be unlocked at any time.)
The other main problem with ESPN NHL hockey is that the difficulty levels are too far apart in terms of how hard they make the gameplay. Going from Rookie level to Pro level, for example, felt like graduating from kindergarten to high school. On Rookie, in my first ever games playing ESPN NHL Hockey, I was winning extremely lopsided games and shutting out opponents with little effort. On Pro, however, I considered myself lucky just to score a goal, let alone win a game. There needs to be some sort of middle ground for average players like myself, or beginning players who are finally getting the hang of the game and want to test themselves. I daresay that the disparity of the difficulty levels might be the one thing that could potentially turn players off from ESPN NHL Hockey.
Other than that minor issue, however, ESPN NHL Hockey is as close to video hockey perfection as any hockey game has ever been. The game just plain feels right; players move with the speed you would expect from hockey but with just enough slipperiness to remind you that the game is played on ice. Goals generally go in for a reason and don’t feel random, as you generally need to do something in order to catch the goalie off-guard in order to score, like screening him, or pulling off a quick one-timer, or faking him out with a deke. The game, overall, just feels like you would expect hockey to play on television, except that you’re holding a controller while watching the game.
The control is just as solid this year as it was in NHL 2K3, and just as much of the manual (half to three quarters, to be exact) is devoted to the control scheme alone. There are, once again, three control schemes, each providing a higher level of precision than the last. There is a “classic” style control which should be familiar to veterans of EA’s hockey games, as well as intermediate and advanced modes which allow you to press different buttons for wrist shots and slap shots, intentionally hook, and select different types of passes on the fly. Obviously, different players want different levels of realism, and these three control schemes, while daunting at first glance, really go all the way to offer the exact amount of control that any given player wants. In that regard, Sega has also added dynamic deking via the right control stick this year. I tried to use this feature in a few games, but it never seemed to do much for me. Combined with the fact that pushing the stick at different angles results in radically different movements, I found this feature awkward to use, but I’ve also never liked having to take my thumb off the face button to use the right analog stick in the first place.
One big change from last year in the area of control that makes a huge difference is the ability to set your strategy for any given game in the pause menu. Previous installments only allowed the player to change strategy on the fly with the D-Pad, thereby creating a distraction from the play at hand. Now, not only can you set your strategy on the pause menu, but you can set different strategies and different levels of aggression for each individual line. This aspect kept NHL 2K3 from being as good as it can be, and Sega obviously realized that fact and decided to more than make up for it, just adding a little bit more to the feeling of total control over your players.
The biggest improvement over last year’s version, as previously mentioned, is the presentation, and Sega and ESPN have come together to completely blow away the perception of spotty replays and completely unrealistic commentary. From the opening movie, which is very similar to the intro to the Stanley Cup playoff games on ESPN, you just get the feeling that Sega put a lot of the past year into making ESPN NHL Hockey look and sound as amazing as it plays.
Graphically, all the player models are all given an overhaul, and faces are close to the real things. I tend to use Patrik Elias as a benchmark, because he has such an unmistakable face, and while I had to concentrate a bit, his video counterpart did look mostly like he does. The framerate stays mostly steady, and the replays are much improved over last years. For one thing, there are now multiple angles shown of each successful goal, and the lame camera angles like the ones from behind the goalie are no more. The only problem with the replays is that there aren’t enough of them. In my experience, the vast majority of the replays I was shown were reserved for goals or penalties; very rarely were replays shown to showcase spectacular saves or crushing hits. Granted, this isn’t a really big deal, but more replays and less tidbits of the players in between plays would have been more to my liking.
One thing that is a problem with the graphics is the rendering of the crowd. Instead of rendering the crowd in 3D, the rows of seats are filled with flat, two-dimensional collections of pixels, some of which wear pixilated jerseys of the home team. Granted, this really is a minor complaint since you so rarely focus on the crowd as opposed to the action on the ice. Nevertheless, since the on-ice graphics are done so well, it is kind of surprising that Sega would have left the crowd looking like this, since it is really one of the few visual aspects of the game that spoil the illusion that you are watching a real game.
The real shining point of ESPN NHL Hockey’s presentation, of course, is the sound, the cornerstone of which is the excellent commentary by ESPN hockey commentators Gary Thorne and Bill Clement. There are enough lines of dialogue that flow together seamlessly enough that it often seems like the game might be being called by Gary and Bill themselves. The dialogue is also nicely varied, though several of the tidbits about individual teams and players have a tendency to repeat over the course of a season, but that it to be expected.
The sound effects are also spot on, with realistic sounds accompanying skates scraping the ice and pucks hitting the posts. The crowd also joins in with the usual chants of “Let’s go, [insert your team here]!” What really caught me by surprise, though, was, after Marty Brodeur made an excellent save in one game, the crowd began chanting, “Marty! Marty! Marty!” It’s a little touch, but it really struck me as one of those details that get missed in most hockey games. The music in between plays is sparse but decent, assuming you like Queen’s We Will Rock You. More variety in the music would have been nice, but, again, music is such a minor part of the hockey game (despite EA’s views on the subject) that it really isn’t noticeable unless you’re playing a number of games in a row.
On the whole, ESPN NHL Hockey is easily the finest hockey game I’ve had the pleasure of playing in a long time. It does have its faults, to be sure, but given the leaps and bounds by which the franchise has improved in only four seasons, I have no doubt that those flaws are simply room for growth. Granted, ESPN NHL Hockey has an advantage in that it had a head start to store shelves, but EA’s NHL 2004 and Midway’s NHL Hitz Pro (which, as of this writing, are just being released) would have to do something incredible to drag me away from ESPN NHL Hockey. This game is all you would expect and more from a collaboration between ESPN and Sega, and is an absolute must-have for any serious hockey fan.
