Anyone that has played a sports game has undoubtedly been hit with the passing comment of, “Oh, you are playing a game. I thought you were watching it live.” I’ve always found this commentary to be somewhat silly. I clearly remember playing NHL 2K on the Dreamcast in my grandmother’s living room on Christmas day and her being astonished that were playing the hockey game instead of watching it. As much as I’ve played the games though, I’ve never felt that if I walked into a room, I would mistake a video game for reality. That is, until NHL 15 started up.
The intro to the opening game, a Game 7 Stanley Cup matchup between the Los Angeles Kings and New York Rangers, looks like something NBC would have broadcast on my television last June. From the outdoor shots of the city to Mike Emrick and Eddie Olczyk overlooking the ice in the announcers booth, this was the first time the attempt at a studio-style presentation in the NHL games has nailed it spot on. And then the game started, and it felt like you expect an NHL game to feel, albeit with some subtle new enhancements to how things operate. When you couple the presentation with things like improved player collisions and puck physics, the initial impression that the game has taken a step forward into the current generation of hardware. It hasn’t. In fact, the NHL series may have regressed considerably.
Let’s get this out of the way immediately, NHL 15 is a pared-down experience for players of past iterations. When compared directly against last gen versions of the series over the last couple years, NHL 15 looks bare-bones. Sure, there is still the standard NHL modes of Exhibition, Be a GM, Be a Pro, NHL Moments, and Hockey Ultimate Team but even some of these modes have been pared down to have less features than their last gen counterparts. In particular Be a GM and Be a Pro are both stripped versions of past iterations.
The option to run a connected franchise with friends via Be a GM is completely gone and players cannot choose more than one team to run during the course of a season. So, if you had plans of running a season with your friends (or, in my case, son), toss that thought completely out the window because you can’t do it. Additionally, the ability to draft your own players )you know one of the primary functions of being a GM) is absent from NHL 15 as the game instead auto-drafts for you. And on the same coin, Be a Pro has been inherently gimped from last gen iterations with the in-depth RPG-like Live the Life mode absent from the game, as is the ability to simulate between shifts you aren’t on the ice. Instead, you get a pretty standard, albeit fun, individual career mode and the ability to create a female skater. So I guess there is that.
Missing features and modes are only meaningful if the core gameplay that functions around them is solid. That is the biggest disappointment of NHL 15. While initially playing the game I felt, everything felt just as I would expect. But the more I played it, the more I noticed the game has some drastic flaws to the base gameplay.
The NHL series has always had some glaring bugs when it comes to scoring. For years skating horizontally in front of the goalie and shooting would result in a scores 90% of the time (and let’s not even get started on the slap shot from the line as you enter the zone that has plagued online play since its inception). I’ve become accustomed to their inclusion but NHL 15 brings it all to a new level of absurdity. For the 21st straight year, goaltenders move side-to-side with the finesse of a Russian Icebreaker and once again they can’t see anything sent towards them from outside 10 feet. Worse now is the fact that goalies overcommit dramatically on nearly every play. Sometimes this results in a spectacular save, something truly amazing to see, but nine times out of ten the dive sees giant swaths of the net open for easy pickings. Add in the fact that the rest of the players on the ice are seemingly handled by dice rolls on whether they will be effective or not and you’ll end up playing in some ridiculously lopsided matches with goals coming from all angles at all times.
It doesn’t help that the difficulty scaling is abhorrently broken. NHL 15 features four difficulty levels, starting at Rookie, ramping up to Pro, then All Star, and ending on Superstar. And none of them progress properly into the next level. Rookie will be too easy for most people as the AI just about stands still. Pro may be too easy for veteran players but at the same time presents the most accurate representation of hockey. I say this because boosting up to All Star seems to make the AI overly aggressive while dumbing down your players. Superstar takes it a step further by making the AI supercharged. I noticed multiple times that despite some of my players being far better speed rating wise, I was getting caught or beat by slower players who were super accurate against my sieve-like goaltenders. As such, playing against the AI in Exhibition, Be a GM, or NHL Moments felt hollow because things were either too easy or overly frustrating. Oddly, Be a Pro doesn’t seem to suffer from these extreme difficulty fluctuations and playing at Pro or All Star difficulty was quite satisfying, although I did have to sit through my time on the bench in real time.
While NHL 15’s core functions as a single player experience don’t capture what I am generally looking for out of the NHL experience, the competitive multiplayer experience does. At least with friends. Playing against friends, be it online or off, is always a good time and when both players understand the goaltending situation is cringe worthy and makes for some fun times. But most players, including myself, won’t be playing with friends and the rest of the game just doesn’t get it right.
Being as NHL 15 comes in nearly an entire year after the new consoles have been out, there is little excuse for this sub-par effort. EA Sports has stated they know the game is missing features and modes and they’ve been good about adding in some of them over the few weeks since launch. However even a few additional modes and features won’t help to fix the feeling that the game is fundamentally broken in many respects. And the sad thing is that despite my disappointment and dissatisfaction with NHL 15, I am going to continue to play it because there is no other choice for hockey games at this moment.
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