NHL 11 is even better than last year’s game, and that’s saying something. It isn’t perfect, but it’s damn near.
The NHL series from EA Sports has improved year-over-year for the past few years, tweaking gameplay, adding features, and slowly becoming every hockey fan’s dream game. It’s been as close to the real game as players can get for the past few years, with bone-crushing hits, fights for the puck against the boards, the ability to place shots, and a huge variety of teams and players, but NHL 11 is the best of the series because it improves upon almost everything good, dumps most of the bad, and adds several new gameplay modes and features that make a huge difference and cause some true “holy crap, did that just happen” moments.
The biggest additions to the game are the inclusion of Ultimate Team, a new physics engine, and the inclusion of the Canadian Hockey League (CHL). While they may not sound like huge changes, they make for one impressive title when combined with every other aspect that’s made the series so great over the year.
The first big addition, Ultimate Hockey Team, is based upon the popular game mode that has been in numerous EA Sports titles such as Madden and FIFA, and it’s a big bonus in NHL 11. Ultimate Team allows players to collect cards of players (for instance, Sidney Crosby) and the cards they receive are the players they have to work with as a team against other opponents in an online league.
Ultimate Team is incredibly addicting and rewarding. Players have the ability to earn new packs of cards which bring new players to their side. They can train their current players to improve their skills, and they then compete for trophies against other opponents. It’s multiplayer, it’s skill-based, and it requires dedication, but that’s not hard to find when the mode is so addictive.
A second big addition to NHL 11 is the CHL. The CHL is the Canadian Hockey League, a league that consists of 60 teams from Canada and the U.S. The teams are made up of teenage players who play a 66 game season with the champions of the three divisions and a host team competing for the ultimate prize at the end of the regular season: the Memorial Cup.
The addition of the CHL adds a realistic dimension to numerous game modes. GMs can now draft players out of the CHL (more than half of all players in the NHL originally played in the CHL), in Be A Pro mode players can rise from CHL star to NHL star, and in Ultimate Team CHL players can be included in player packs.
Finally, the actual gameplay has been tweaked to near perfection with the addition of a physics engine. Throughout the history of the series, hits have been canned animations where players fell in one of several ways when hit, but in NHL 11 a new physics engine allows for dynamic hits; players fall in different ways all the time.
This makes the overall game feel much more realistic (there are less gigantic hits that rattle bones, but when they do happen it is rewarding because they aren’t standard fare). This is the real NHL, not NHL Blitz, and the new physics engine fully enforces the realism of the game. The first time a player gets knocked down, collapses realistically to the ice, and slowly climbs back up is a serious “wow” moment because it looks so realistic. The same goes for another addition thanks to the physics engine: the ability to have a stick fall on the ice or get broken.
Broken sticks don’t sound like a game changer, but in the real game of hockey, they make a huge difference in each game. Broken sticks can leave a team a man down as he scrambles to his bench to get a new stick, they can disrupt play because players can trip on the piece of lumber, and shots and passes can be deflected by hitting them. It adds unpredictability to the game, throwing in elements that no one can control.
Another pleasant change is in the goaltending. One of the most notoriously difficult aspects of making an NHL game is perfecting goaltending play. The game of hockey is exceedingly precise. Shots must be lined up to fit in a small hole as the goalie covers nearly the entire net, and because of the difficulty in creating goalie play, there were frequent ways to glitch and beat the goalie in previous iterations of the series. Luckily, the goalies seem nearly perfect this time around. Through hours of play both online and offline, I have yet to find a way to consistently fool a goalie. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there – there’s probably some place where players can consistently beat them – it just means that there’s no obvious glitch in the goaltending.
Finally, there is the excellent new faceoff system that allows players to realistically jostle for position in the faceoff circle, pushing at their opponent, drawing the puck back, tying the puck up, pushing it forward, and even shooting from the moment the puck drops.
The number of innovations in NHL 11 are thoroughly impressive.
There are some small issues with the game, though they don’t come anywhere near being deal breakers on any level. There are some minor frame rate issues during cut scenes between plays and and at the beginning of games. There are also some frame rates slowdown during Be A Pro mode’s games. They don’t affect play, they just affect the way the game looks for a few seconds.
There was also a clear lack of attention paid to Be A Pro mode. While the mode itself is great, there were hardly any changes made from last year’s version to this year’s. There was the potential to have players begin their careers as CHL players if they wanted, playing through a full season to build up stats and become instant star-ready, a Sidney Crosby type of player. Instead, the addition of the CHL was treated only as a minor addition to Be A Pro. Players can compete in the Memorial Cup tournament, playing several games to gain a draft ranking. It’s fun, and it should definitely be an option, but it should be an option to play a full season and get a high rating before jumping into the NHL.
NHL 11 is the best hockey game EA’s produced at least in this generation, and possibly ever. It has very few weak points and offers a plethora of game modes, new additions, and leagues to fool around with. There are hundreds of hours of fun to be had with this game. Buying this game is a no-brainer.
