Okay, I’m not an EA Sports shill, I swear. Not that I don’t highly recommend many of their titles, and I’ve sure ‘donated’ a lot of my money to them over the years, but the fact that my first ‘Review’ was Fifa 10, and my first ‘First Impressions’ post is NHL 11 is but a coincidence — owed in large part to the fact that I had been playing a lot of Fifa throughout the soccer season, and then had the itch for a the new NHL offering due to that being the only sport currently in season that I really care about (Okay, so the NFL is still plugging along, but I’m a Browns fan. Our season ended sometime in September, and the Buckeyes’ bowl game is still two weeks away.)
Last week . . . I cannot remember well enough to be more specific than that . . . I finally caved in to said itch, and stopped by the store to pick up a copy of NHL 11. I grew up going to farm-team games, and I’ve been to a Columbus Bluejackets game or two, but I’m far from being a big hockey fan. But like soccer games, I’ve always loved hockey from a video game perspective. There was one game in particular that me and a few friends would play every day after school for what had to be an entire year. Sadly, I do not remember which exact year/title/franchise it was.
Anyway, so since whatever day it was last week, I’ve been playing the new NHL 11. At this point, I’ve really only been playing the ‘Be a Pro’ mode, though the ‘Ultimate Team’ mode was one of the other ‘bulletpoints’ that contributed to my desire to pick up this title.
Now, less than a week — or about a week — or a little over a week? into the game, and I’m having fun so far. The menu system is very similar to Fifa’s, and probably similar to other current EA Sports titles. EA’s menu system(s) are a pet peeve of mine, though I’ve dealt with much worse. When moving up the nested menus, EA likes to make the least-likely action the highlighted-by-default option. For example; choosing “Play be a pro mode” moves on the the secondary menu selection for said mode, but defaults you to “Start New Be a Pro” rather than “Load Existing Be a Pro”. Considering a play-through of this mode emulates a player’s entire career, why would the default action be to start a whole new career every time I play? Of course, pressing ‘down’ to select ‘load an existing save’ is only a minor annoyance, but as this type of issue applies to just about every menu selection, these minor annoyances add up. (For the record, Fifa’s menus are even worse in this regard.)
As for the game play; I do feel like everything’s a little sluggish and unresponsive. This could be due to the fact that I’m new to the game, and I’m just not good at it at all yet. On defense, I feel a bit helpless. You can perform a poke-check or quickly sweep your stick by holding the same button and manually moving the right thumbstick, but no good option to really use your stick as a consistent blocker. I’d love to be able to control my stick in such a way that I’m continuously adjusting it relative to my skater’s movement and position to attempt to choke off a passing lane. There is a button to block a pass, but the (relatively) lengthy animation and the fact that your player steps out to stretch out his stick means you’ve just lost your ability to make any quick positional adjustments until the animation is done, so if you miss (which as a newbie, I *always* do) you’ve just taken yourself completely out of the play.
And checking! Isn’t the body-check always the most exciting part of hockey? NHL11 boasts its new physics system which instead of using canned animations for the player on the receiving-end of the hit, it uses this new system to calculate the hit and result. This means that “no two checks are the same” (which isn’t true, necessarily, but you see what they mean.) Body-checks in hockey games have come a long way since my SNES hockey days. You cannot rely on skating around and knocking over anyone and everyone that moves. In NHL 11, not only is it hard to even make contact, but when you do, your stats, player’s momentum, and player’s sizes are all taken into account, which means you’ll have to carefully pick and chose when and who you decide to hit.
I have no problem with this, except I’m not a big guy, and when I make my virtual athletes, I try to portray myself as accurately as possible — you know, except athletic and with at least a little coordination and balance. But as a new player with no points devoted to checking ability, and with my small size, I can’t knock over anyone. Even the hapless guys I hit from behind after play is blown dead (and thanks, EA, for giving me the ability to do these cheap shots!) Oh well, I guess my guy’s a lover, not a fighter.
My only other real complaint at this point is that once you start a ‘Be a Pro’ career, it doesn’t look like you can change any of the game options. For instance, the first night I brought the title home, I had limited time to play, so I popped the game in and fired it up and launched a pro career with the default settings. This puts the period length at 5 minutes, which to me is way too fast for a career simulation (but great for a quick game when you don’t have a lot of time.) I understand not being able to change a game’s duration during a contest that’s in progress, but when Saturday rolled around and I had some real time to play, I couldn’t go in and make the games any longer.
The same is true for the difficulty level. I started at the default ‘Pro’ difficulty, but decided to try the next step up. I had to go back and start a whole new career (after already doing so once to change the game duration.) After losing my first 5 or 6 games, and finding that I was struggling to even earn the meager 14% of the XP my “manager expected me to earn”, I decided at this point I needed to stick with Pro difficulty, at least until I get better. So restarted my career again. Either the ability to make these changes mid-career is hidden somewhere in a nested menu that I cannot locate, or it’s just not there. Either way, that’s a big annoyance.
As for the thing that matters most — the time on the ice — the game has been both challenging and rewarding. Hopefully, as I get more time with the game, the experience will continue to improve.
njoystic 