Okay everybody its official teh NHL season is officially cancelled and there will be no NHL hockey this season, luckily for us there are NHL games. The very first hockey game out of the gates was ESPN NHL 2K5 and it is awesome, it is ESPN's best NHL game that they have made to date. The game features good graphics, fantastic gameplay, and more modes than you ever dreamed of. The bad new is that there is no NHL season so they had tp push the game up a little and it isnt as pollished as you might of expected. To start off this game plays amazing, this year the developers got it perfect. The speed of the game on the default setting is great, the way the players behave is great also and is really realistic. Unlike last years game scoring is not impossible anymore and is not too easy at the same time. If it does get to hard you can just put the difficulty down a notch and play from there. They really balanced it out this year between all of the difficulty settings. The feel of the game is much improved from the last game although it is not all whole lot different from last years game. Now you can use the right analog stick to do some nasty moves when you dont have the puck. You can hook them, slash them and sometimes even elbow them by using the analog stick. The only problem with this is that if you keep doing it your going to get called for a penalty. There is also a new fighting system in this game, which is much better than the last years game but still is no where near as good as NHL 2005's. The whole fighting system is based on this tension meter, basically if the meter fills up 2 players on the ice will drop the gloves and thats all there is to it. When you're fighting you can duck, punch, do uppercuts and even taunt them if you want to. The best thing about this game is the variety of game modes, there is just tons of stuff to do in this game. Firstly theres the franchise mode, this years franchise mode is very different from last years games. The contracts are actually realistic, you dont use that dumb point system they've used for all the other games. Now you need the hire your staff which is new, you have to hire and fire all of your coaches like the head coach, minor league coach and all of those guys. There is also a new minor league, the minor league coach coaches the minor leaguers! The players that you send down the the minors actually form a team, although you can't play minor league games you can still check on how good your team is doing. There's also a huge improvement to the CPU trading and player signing, teams will actually go and sign free agents and they are much better at offering trades. Probably the best part about the franchise mode is the new scouting system, basically what you do is scout a country like Canada and the scouts will go and scout Canadian players. You can acuallt play games and play skills competitions and see who as the hardest shot, whos the best goalie and so on. Overall the franchise mode is an amazing part of this game. The skybox makes its return in this game and it is very simalar, there are more unlockables. There are some new modes such as the dream team mode, its like there are 20 dream teams and its a ladder so you beat the 20th team and go on to play the 19th place team. Also a new mode is the party mode, which is kind of suprsing like a party mode? In a hcokey game? But actually this mode is really good and extremilly fun. You can do tons of modes like free for all , so there will be 4 players and an empty net and whoever scores the most goals wins. Probably one of the best modes is a mode where one of the players is "it" and he must hit someone else so he becomes "it". This time, like NFL 2K5, there are online leagues and roster downloads which is pretty cool. The graphics and sound havent really improved much since last yeats game, but they are still alright. The games animation is really well done, when you are playing if almosy looks like real hockey so its quite the thing to watch. Out of the 2 versions, the xbox version is a better version of the 2, although if you have a PS2 version you arent getting cheated out by much. Overall this game is the best hockey game ESPN has made, and if you are missing NHL hockey and want a game then I suggest you get ESPN NHL 2K5.
After delivering a powerful performance with last year's ESPN NHL Hockey, developer Kush Games has scored another victory in the name of good hockey gaming, making exactly the kind of upgrades you would expect from an an... Read Full Review
its an awesome game ea sports sux compared to this.... the franchise mode is so indepth. its insane. and the season is also good too. if u like hockey u have to try it period like Ea sports games ar ok but this is ten ti... Read Full Review
