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How many damn sports game of the year titles does EA want for one franchise? I feel like a broken record. Every year, for the last several years, I've been put up to review the latest entry into the NHL series. So, here it is, NHL 11. And what the shit am I going to do but shower it with praise?
So let's get the negative stuff out of the way now. The stuff that sits right at the top of the review so the folks at EA can find it faster whilst scouring over the hundreds of pieces in press coverage. What makes NHL 11 suck?
Not too much. They did improve a bit upon menu navigation and the ease of game entry and setting tweaking. But only a bit. Pieces of the menu are sometimes hard to find. Especially with your own Pro, it's always been difficult to tell which Pro you're tweaking when you edit the sucker. Is it your online Pro? If so, it should be under the online menu. Is it your Be a Pro Pro? Then it should be under the Be a Pro menu. Instead, it sits right in the main branch, being ambiguous.
But they did reorganize the way lobbies are handled. Particularly the EASHL lobbies. Instead of finding an opponent and organizing your teams on the fly, players will meet in a dressing room before meeting their competition. The dressing room gives teams a private space to pick positions and talk strategy.
Two other negative slams stand in the path of glory, a trophy NHL 11 achieves despite these issues. The commentary is largely unchanged. It's been updated, sure, but I feel like I've been watching the same hockey game for like 100 years. Are new announcers needed? Who knows? But it's time to throw out the bag of lines and start completely fresh.
Finally, the game still slows down around the low goal. Fans of the franchise know exactly what I mean. When the action moves towards the goal at the bottom of the screen, and especially in the office behind the net, the game starts moving in an absurdly choppy fashion. It's been that way every year for the last few years, but it still remains in place. Sort of a pain when playing defense.
There, I did it. I went and got the bulk of the griping out of the way. Minor pains in the large picture. NHL 11 is a game stacked with additions and improvements. The list of such items is massive, and it's entirely too long to be discussed at length in this review. For ease of reading, I've decided to break this review into two portions, not counting the bit above: Off the Ice and On the Ice. That should make sense, but the first portion covers the menus and modes while the second portions covers the physical gameplay tweaks. If you want, you can count the section above as "The Bitching."
There's no way that I'll hit on every single tweak and change during the scope of this piece. It won't happen. Blame EA.
