NHL 2005

"NHL 2005 takes a big hit and is out cold"

I've been looking forward to this game for a long time. What with the impending NHL lock-out, I was relying on this game to get me through the tough times without an NHL. Unfortunately, this game comes up short in many areas.

Graphics - 9/10
Wow. The graphics are awesome this year around. It's perhaps the only thing that is better than NHL 2004. The cyber faces of the NHL players look phenomenal. Last year, coaches were tough to identify but this time around, they look incredibly life-like. I easily recognized Marc Crawford and Jacques Martin without even seeing the players sitting on the bench in front of them. I even noticed the faces of some regular NHL referees, but maybe it was just my imagination. The puck looks a bit bigger than it should, but that's really my only gripe.

Sound - 6/10
The on-ice sounds are, as always, amazing. You can hear the puck rattle off the glass, players smacking the ice after a huge hit, the roar of the crowd and deafening goal horn after the home team scores, it's all here. There are some decent menu tunes as well, which never hurts. But then we come to the commentary. First of all, it took me a couple games to figure out how to turn it on (Turn On Ice sounds OFF) but once I did, it sounded just like NHL 2004. It seems to me that they just took NHL 2004's commentary, added a few lines about face-off alignment, and put it in the game. If the commentary was new and fresh, I would have given the sound a much better score.

Control - 2/10
This really disappointed me. When you're mapping your controller, you don't have full control over what button does what! Whenever I hit the button that should shoot off the deke, the game pauses. I can't even find a way to re-map the pause button either. There are some buttons that it won't let you map to either for no reason that I can understand. Some controllers aren't even supported. And if you don't have a dual-analog controller, you'll have to change lines through the keyboard or leave them on Auto. Also, they replaced of the 'saucer pass' button with a 'wrist shot' button. So you have a Wrist Shot button and a normal Shoot button which can pretty much do wrist shots anyway. You can't even do a one time with the wrist shot button either, which is disappointing.

Gameplay - 8/10
The gameplay is more than decent. The added feature of Open Ice (Which I'll talk about more later) is a good one. You can set picks, set up a give and go, fire up the ice for a break-away pass, or even call for a deflection. You can also set up your face-off formations as either "Conservative", "Standard", or "Aggressive" which will arrange your players around the face-off as you want them. Overall, the gameplay makes up a bit for a disappointing game.

Added/Removed Features - 2/10
Let's start with the plus side, shall we? NHL 2005's newest feature is called Open Ice. Using it, you can have the computer set a pick for you, or find some open ice for a pass. Or, the computer can take over controlling the puck while you find some open ice behind the defense and call for a breakaway pass. This is a great new feature which should be in all hockey games for years to come. In the wake of Canada's World Cup Win, EA has added in an official 'World Cup Tournament'. They've updated the jerseys of the 8 international teams in the tournament to what they actually look like in real life. You no longer have to download the latest jersey's to get your International tournaments looking realistic. They even included Canada's gold jersey that they played in against the US in the first game. Although I don't know if that's a plus or a minus... Also new in the game is EA Sports FREE4ALL. Basically, it's 4 players trying to score on one goalie and whoever scores the most goals wins.

On to the negative side now. Wait for it....there is NO Create-A-Player!! I've created countless players over the years in every NHL game. The first thing I would usually do is create myself and the start a season and lead a team to the Stanley Cup. Hey, it's as close as I'm going to get, but EA didn't manage to get it in the game. Apparently, they had a brand new, in-depth Create-A-Player in store, but they "ran out of time" and it wasn't up to the quality that they would have wanted it at. So, we are left with nothing this year as far as Create-A-Player goes. Next on the list is Create-A-Team. Don't worry, this feature has been included. I quickly created a team to see what it was like, and it seems to be less on depth than it was in NHL 2004! Not only that, you can't even use your created teams in Dynasty Mode!

Speaking of Dynasty Mode, I've been through one season so far and, well, it's better than last years in some ways, but in other ways, it's worse. Hiring staff is done much better. Instead of getting 'Upgrade Points' like last year, you get a certain budget and as your team does better, your budget increases so you can hire more staff. Finances are also much more in-depth. You can set ticket prices, concession prices, and even set out how much to spend on Fan Giveaways. I've been playing with the Chicago Blackhawk's so far just to see how a struggling team would fare, and so far I haven't had any problems making a profit. So perhaps it's a bit too easy. Now let's say that you're in the middle of a season and you want to see who the scoring leader is. You would just go to the Stats screen and check the League Leaders, right? Wrong! You can't check the stats league-wide. All you can do is check the leaders team by team, and then compile a list by yourself if you really want to know. Scouting is a joke as they use an A-E rating style instead of using number ratings.

Overall - 4/10
Overall, this game is disappointing. The controls are frustratingly messed up, commentary is all the same as last year, line-changing on the fly is needlessly complicated, no league-leader stats in Dynasty mode, no Create-a-Team in Dynasty mode, no Create-a-Player at all, and there are just so many little things that they did wrong. Underneath all of the disappointing features is a decent hockey game. It just has absolutely no polish whatsoever. If they just got all of the little things fixed up, then perhaps this game would be getting more than a 4/10.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/04