It will be hard for EA to top this franchise release! (SP only review)
The faceoff mechanism is revamped, and for the better. It is still a game of timing and your centres 'faceoff' skill, but also brings in a sort of rock-paper-scissors strategy as well. You can pull the puck back forehand, backhand, you can tie up your opponent, you can stick lift, shoot off the draw, or even poke the puck forward and attempt to control it going forward with your centreman. Or course, each move has varying degrees of success and at least one counter. No more spamming the faceoff button for the puck! :P
Now onto my favorite game mode: Be A GM.
There has been enormous advances to this mode, and is easily a good enough reason alone to buy this game. Serious NHL fans will rejoice at the amount of detail they've added to managing your team.
First off, in contracts there are RFA and UFA, all with complete NHL rules. You must meet salary cap, and sign a full roster for your NHL team as well as your AHL affiliate. You will also do the drafting, complete with the full 7 rounds.
The AI managers are much smarter than before, and now it is no easy job to take advantage of them via trading. Only thing I noticed is that it is very easy to trade for the high rounds in a draft one for one with yours, as long as you add a free 7th round as a bonus. For example, you could trade for the 1st round picks of each round, for your last round picks for each round (assuming you win the cup), as long as you give them your 7th round pick and do not ask for theirs. We all know the first pick is dramatically better than the 31st pick, so there are still ways to fool via trade, but not as dramatically.
There are many small things in management that make things easy on you, for example during free agency, you can sort players by how many teams are interested in them. This way, you will never lose out in bidding for a great prospect that might have low starting stats, just because they are hidden in a huge table.
I feel it is a must to be critical in a review, so I will tell you about the flaws instead of going on about the Be A GM mode, which you can discover for yourself.
- Before the second Title Update (2nd major downloadable patch), Be a GM was fatally broken. Player experience was capped relatively low so that it stopped adding to the skill pool after around 20 games. Before starting this mode make sure you go online and patch your game, because games created pre-patch can never be fixed
- Freezing. Make sure you back up your game via multiple manual saves. I have had the game freeze on many occasions (granted I have play ALOT) and after rebooting, the save will either have not worked, or worse, have partially worked and corrupted your save file beyond repair. If you are several seasons into Be A Pro or Be A GM and this happens, hate to say I told you so!
- Bad AI pathing; your teammates occasionally skate near you and block your player when on the rush by the opponents blueline. It effectively ruins the rush and most likely leads to a turnover if you don't react fast and dump the puck.
Smaller issues, such as repetitive commentary, faces do not resemble players, ridiculous goalie saves that are common occurrence, glitchy goals. Really not a big issue in the grand scheme of things, and the two most frustrating problems can be avoided by following my instructions.