This game almost single-handedly brought down EA's NHL 9X franchise on the Genesis.
Since this was the successor the the heralded NHL '94, which I had for the Sega CD, it would improve upon greatness, right? Definitely not. The producers, for whatever reason, messed up a solid game engine and released a broken game that still leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth just thinking about this title.
First and foremost, the players skated unrealistically fast. So fast in fact that it felt as if I were politing Sergei Federov on meth; every single player was this fast. I can understand that EA wanted to bring hockey's fast-paced action to gamers but this was already done successfully on previous titles. Some players, like Roenick, Coffey, and Federov were indeed fast in NHL 94 for example, while others were slower. Just as in real life. Everybody on skates can't be a speed demon. Tell that to the crew who developed NHL 95.
I also found the animation and the moveset to be stiff compared to earlier NHL 9x titles. In short, the natural feeling of puck control wasn't there. It also appeared to me that the sprites were made more unrealistic this time around. Standing and skating players looked like barely animate scarecrows. I'm aware that the sprites for earlier NHL games also looked a bit lame, but they had more character in some way compared to this.
Supposedly more features were added to NHL 95, but I didn't bother playing this one enough to explore them. And the pathetic goalie AI and weak defense issues were not resolved in this game, a problem that plagued all of the console versions of the series until the twilight of the 1990s.
Inspiring sports games such as NHL 94 helped me become a huge hockey fan back in the day. I began to lose interest in the NHL after the walkout of 1995, and come to think of it, in part to this game. It was *that* bad to play.