NHL 15 Review

Posted By: Alex Deckard

NHL 15 is like a really nice house that you’re only allowed to put six pieces of furniture in.  It’s all well and good if you only REALLY use the bed, a chair, and a table, but if you have all sorts of guests over all the time, it gets really inconvenient.  Plus, even if you only use those three pieces of furniture, the rest of your huge house feels like it’s going to waste.


I swear I’m not crazy.  I’ll explain after the break.

Last year, EA Sports announced that NHL 14 would be PS3/360 exclusive, as they wanted more time to get the series ready for PS4/XBONE.  People started imagining a grand and expansive hockey experience on the next generation of consoles, with amazing graphics, true-to-life physics, and bursting with all the features we know and love.

We got a bare bones “Play Now” mode, a neutered “Be a GM” mode, one-on-one online play, and HUT, which is like fantasy hockey if you had to buy players in booster packs.  Also a practice mode where you only seem to be able to shoot against Henrik Lundqvist.  Gone are the halcyon days of EASHL, which allowed you and five friends to form a team and compete in regularly scheduled games online.  Gone are the days of micromanaging AHL players in Be a GM so you could maximize the potential of your talent.  Gone are the days of actually picking players in the Be a GM draft, which has been replaced by a computer autodraft that doesn’t understand that you don’t need more forwards damn it all our defensemen are old and we need new talent.

Sorry.  Got carried away for a minute there.

Perhaps the game’s greatest sin, among all the features left out, is that as a hockey game, it’s fantastic.  It’s the best one yet by a wide margin.  Everything feels fantastic.  Everything looks fantastic.  The puck doesn’t fly like a frisbee when you clear it to the other end.  Players can trip over each other now.  Everything feels like it’s got mass to it, and impacts actually feel impactful.  The revamped skill stick used to deke the puck around and fire off shots works really well, though it does take some getting used to for people used to how it worked in the past.

Why is this a problem?

Because it makes me feel guilty for buying it, as opposed to vindicated in not buying it.  Make no mistake, I am saying that you should buy this game if you’re a fan of the series or even just of hockey in general.  But buy it used.  In about a month.  Don’t reward EA for stripping features just so they can add them back to future iterations and pretend that they just came up with them.

Graphics: 8\10 - I would rate these higher, as the fidelity is quite good and everything is very detailed, but “graphics” has to take into account the effect that they have on the game.  For instance, the jerseys sort of flutter now, as opposed to being a static mesh texture.  That’s all well and good, but they move around like they’re made of thin silk.  Hockey jerseys move, but they don’t glide around the players torso.  And the exaggerated effect is still jarring during gameplay.  There are also still frequent clipping issues that just seem like no brainers.  EA claims to have modeled the players all the way down to equipment textures.  So why do I still regularly see goalie jersey clipping into their pants?  They claimed to have added actual emotion to player faces, but when I look at them I still see them peak at “dull surprise.”  The graphics are really pretty, but they should be better.

Sound: 7\10 - Again, the fidelity is great.  It’s the execution I question.  Announcers repeat phrases far too often, the crowd appears to only know the word “aaaaahhhhh”, and the soundtrack is both terrible and small, a problem compounded by the new addition of “not being able to make a custom soundtrack”.  At least they don’t play it on menus anymore.  But I can’t justify rating it any lower because the on ice sounds are so fantastic.  It sounds like they re-recorded everything from scratch.  All the sounds of actual hockey are just impeccable.  So again, it appears that EA Sports has decided to min-max the living hell out of this game.

Control: 9\10 - So good.  Best part of the game.  Any problems I have with the control seem to be based on me being bad at the game, rather than the game having spotty controls.  The skill stick works great, passing is responsive, the players move like you’d expect them to.  If I had to come up with something (which I do, because control is clearly not a 10\10), I’d say that the dekes seem a bit stiff when you do them.  There’s no way to bail partway through, so you wind up deking into some dude’s skate.  But only rarely.

Fun: 8\10 - Ah, the nebulous category of “fun”.  I enjoy this game.  If you like hockey and you play video games, I think you will also enjoy this game.  Probably enough to buy it new, definitely enough to buy it for cheaper in a couple weeks or a month.  If you don’t like hockey, it’s unlikely that this game will convince you, but I’d still suggest renting it from one of those rental boxes outside McDonalds or something.  If you played the series previously and didn’t play EASHL, buy it.  If you only played it for EASHL, skip it.  There’s nothing here for you.

OVERALL, I GIVE NHL 15 A SCORE OF 7\10.  I REALLY ENJOY IT, BUT ENOUGH FEATURES ARE MISSING THAT IT MAKES ME FEEL WEIRD ABOUT BUYING IT NEW.