(2K Sports; 2008)
Graphics
The Wii is definitely capable of better graphics than this. The ice and arenas look quite nice, and the animation and flow of the game is not all that bad, but the player models look terrible. None of the players’ faces look right—even generic faces are muddy and unclear—and their bodies look low quality and messy. The jerseys are pretty messy, too.
One odd thing I noticed is that the crowd graphics/animations are kind of… off. When they’re in the distance, they don’t look too bad, because it looks like people in the audience are doing different things. But up close, the audience members are really grainy and pixelly. Interestingly, they all seem to be facing the camera at all times! During a break in the action, the camera was showing the ice from behind the net, and the people between the net and the camera were sitting facing the camera—away from the ice! Not just turning around looking at the camera… I mean legs, chairs and all! Sloppy coding?
Some of the stat menus are very cramped and the numbers are quite small, even on my big TV. I can’t imagine playing this on a 25″ CRT television—it would just be impossible to read the charts.
Note that I am playing on a 32″ Sharp Aquos with component cables.
Graphics: 4/10
Sound
Normally, the endlessly repeating soundtrack and commentary in a game like this can be very annoying. For what it’s worth, the soundtrack is appropriate to the game. The fact that I haven’t played too much yet may contribute to the fact that I don’t find the music gratingly annoying, but at least it’s not annoying right out of the gate.
The commentary is generally pretty sharp and appropriate to the game. I haven’t had too much of a problem with it yet. There is a play-by-play guy, a colour commentator, and an on-ice commentator who occasionally offers insight into a game’s progress by reporting on interviews (which we don’t hear) with the coaches.
You also have a lot of flexibility in adjusting the volume levels of the arena announcer, goal horn, crowd, commentary, etc.
Sound: 8/10
Controls
The new Wii controls are obviously going to be pretty important to the success of this game. I’ll say right away that they’re hit or miss, so I’ll break it down that way.
The Good:
Precision passing and chain passing using the Wii pointer are not as complicated or hard to execute as they look on paper. The pointer doesn’t really distract from the action, and it’s pretty smart about which player you intend to point at.
The shooting control waggle for wrist shots and slap shots is also well done. Sometimes, if you don’t waggle correctly, it won’t register as a shot attempt, but this is just an issue of getting used to how to use the controls.
The Bad:
Menu navigation is not very intuitive. Sometimes you use the analog stick to cycle through options, and sometimes you use the control pad, and it’s not immediately obvious which to use where. It takes some getting used to, and it becomes easier after a while, but it could have been done better.
Body checks are performed by shaking the nunchuk. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work quite as well as the remote-shaking shooting controls. It’s not exactly bad, but it definitely feels imprecise.
The Ugly:
Fighting is also performed with motion controls. The player tilts the nunchuk to maintain balance and punches with the Wii remote. Unfortunately, this just doesn’t work at all. What makes it even worse is that big goofy “instructions” appear in the screen in the form of cartoonish graphical representations of the nunchuk and remote moving around. It’s pretty brutal. Fighting can be turned off, but that’s no fun.
Controls: 6.5/10
Features
The game’s most interesting feature is its roster management system. This also happens to be the feature to which the player has the most access right from the get-go, so that’s what I’m going to talk about here. There is a fully-featured character and team creation system as well as a character editor that allows players to adjust the stats of their favourite NHL stars. Think Sidney Crosby is overrated? You can scale him back.
Sounds good so far, right? Unfortunately, while this system should have gone all the way and allowed players complete control over the creation and management of their rosters, the system is crippled by a couple of limitations.
The first is the limit on the number of players each team can have. Joe Sakic starts the game as a free agent, but I couldn’t assign him to the Colorado Avalanche because they have too many players already! If I want to solve this, I have to dump one of their other players to the minors or free agency.
The second limitation is the salary cap. While the presence of the salary cap in the game is a definite bonus, the player has no control over the salaries of players! Chris Chelios starts the game as a free agent. When I assigned him to the Detroit Red Wings, his salary was arbitrarily assigned based on his stats, to the tune of $1.15m. In real life, Chelios signed a one-year deal with the Wings for $750k! Not only can this screw a player over in terms of cap space, but it can also mean that tweaking the rosters so they reflect their real-life counterparts can put teams over the salary cap, which means you either have to make more adjustments or play with the cap disabled. When adjusting rosters in a fully-featured editor like this, the player should have full control—and that includes control over salaries.
Features: 7/10
Minor Issues
Other than what I’ve already mentioned above, there are a couple of lingering little issues. The first is that the in-game presentation of stats and interesting factoids is a little bit weak. The game doesn’t trace interesting storylines, and doesn’t even make it immediately apparent who got the assists on a goal. The player has to look in a menu for that information.
I’ve also run into a strange little problem with the auto-save function. After playing a game and exiting back to the season’s home menu, the game will attempt to auto-save (if you have that option enabled). But I keep getting a message saying the game is unable to save to my Wii system memory. The odd thing is that I have 350+ blocks free on my internal memory, and if I try to save manually I face no problems whatsoever. I don’t know what the problem is, but it’s not a major one.
For the record, the save data for my game, which includes my player profile, custom rosters, and my ongoing season save data, is 47 blocks. It’s not too bad, but if you run your Wii on empty, make sure you free up some space before playing.
Conclusions
All in all, this certainly isn’t the best hockey game I’ve ever played. It has a lot going for it, but it seems that every positive feature of the game is shot in the foot by some annoying problem. If you just want to play a quick arcade-style game of hockey, the skating, passing, and shooting controls should be fun, but they’re held back by wonky faceoff, fighting, stick-handling, and checking controls. If you want an in-depth hockey / management simulator, you definitely have a lot of freedom over what you can do with players and rosters, but you may find yourself having to find creative ways around the game’s arbitrary limitations, and you’re going to have a hard time getting everything exactly how you want it.
In the end, this seems like the kind of game that makes a player hopeful for a promising sequel. Unfortunately, pretty much every sports game works that way, and sequels seldom fix all of the problems from previous games (while usually introducing new ones of their own).
The bottom line is that this is the only NHL and NHLPA licensed game for the Wii, so if you want to play an NHL game and you only have a Wii, then this is what you get.
Final Score: 6/10
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