As the year rolls on, the likelihood of a real-life hockey season seems to dwindle bit by bit thanks to the impending player lockout. Indeed, hockey fans haven't had a whole lot to smile about lately, and, in fact, they've become even more uneasy when it was recently made known that all of the major hockey titles being released this year were bumped up on the release calendar in anticipation of said lockout. This could have conceivably been a disaster, because a quicker release usually means a rushed development cycle. ESPN NHL 2K5, the latest in developer Visual Concepts' critically revered hockey series, is the first NHL title out of the gate this year. Assuming you'll want the bad news first, we'll say that it's definitely apparent that certain areas of the game could have undergone a few more weeks of development so that the final product could have been more polished. However, the good news is that the few rough spots are overshadowed in every conceivable way by what is essentially the best game this hockey franchise has ever put out. And with the game retailing for the same budget pricing as its sister title, ESPN NFL 2K5, there simply isn't any excuse for a hockey fan to be without ESPN NHL 2K5.

Sure, it's depressing that the real NHL season is probably toast this year...

Where ESPN NHL 2K5 lives and dies is with its gameplay. To merely call ESPN NHL 2K5 the most accurate representation of the sport of hockey on the market would be a crime. It also happens to be the most fun you'll have playing hockey on a console. The speed of the game is absolutely perfect by default, the behavior of players both offensively and defensively is wholly realistic, the controls are extremely smooth, and the scoring in the game has finally reached a solid balance between utterly impossible and much, much too easy. This is largely thanks in part to what would appear to be a big effort by the game's developers to finally make the difficulty settings properly balanced without requiring you to constantly tweak sliders just to make certain aspects of the game feel proper. Of course, there are tons and tons of sliders in the game that allow you to tweak practically every imaginable aspect you could think of, but, thankfully, this year you simply have them as options rather than as necessary evils. In fact, all you'll really need to do gameplay-wise is bump the difficulty up to pro or all-pro from the default level of amateur, and odds are that you'll be set for a good, long while.

On the flip side of the coin, ESPN NHL 2K5's gameplay is mechanically a whole lot like last year's ESPN NHL Hockey. There are a couple of additions, such as the new right-analog-stick-based "dirty moves" system, as well as a new fighting engine. Fundamentally, though, these aspects aren't really that big of an upgrade from last year's game. The dirty moves system is conceptually interesting. Basically, if you're in a desperate situation and need to absolutely stop a guy from scoring--or if you just want to play a little overly rough--you can tap the right analog stick to perform a sort of halfhearted cheap shot (like a hook), or you can press in the right analog stick button to deliver a more punishing blow (like an elbow shot). Of course, this will often lead to a trip to the sin bin, but when you absolutely have to take a guy out, the moves are effective. The one downside to this, however, is that you will see a lot more hooking penalties and similar types of infractions throughout a game. In fact, perhaps you'll see a few more than is really realistic.

The new fighting engine implemented for 2K5 is a massive upgrade from the horrid fighting in pretty much every other Visual Concepts hockey game up to this point. Fighting is based around a new tension meter, which is sort of similar to what last year's NHL 2004 had. Performing more checks and hits and otherwise irritating your opponents will cause the meter to continuously rise. Once both teams have reached their peaks, two players will drop the gloves. When fighting, you can duck, grab, punch, uppercut, and, yes, even taunt your opponent. Each punch and grab you perform takes away a bit of stamina from your player, so you have to be a bit more careful, and you can't just button-mash. From a pure fighting standpoint, this engine is still pretty disjointed--with kind of a herky-jerky feel to the action--though you do feel far more in control of what you're doing than in past games. The one nice thing, though, is that you can basically move anywhere on the ice. This allows you to kind of skate around while baiting your opponent--before you go in for an attack. This component would be a lot cooler if the fighting were better, however.

With a hockey game as good as ESPN NHL 2K5 to keep us busy, all that doom and gloom just seems to disappear!

And that's really about all that's been added to ESPN NHL's gameplay mechanics. There's also a new option to press the L button while skating to skate backward, effectively letting you skate with proper defenseman technique. But beyond the scope of these few changes, this year's game plays a whole lot like last year's. If you were hoping for some big sweeping gameplay changes, you just aren't going to find them here, because last year's game was strong enough that it didn't really need much tweaking. However, as we said before, it seems as though a big chunk of the game's development time went toward balancing the game, which we consider to be a huge success. The new gameplay balance, along with the couple of mechanical tweaks, are actually pretty substantial enhancements.

ESPN NHL 2K5's gameplay is very tight, but its numerous modes and features are just as impressive. To put it bluntly, there has never been a more feature-rich game of hockey than this one, and nearly every included feature is a winner. Let's start with the franchise mode, which has been built from the ground up this year. What's new? Practically everything. For starters, the game now features real monetary contracts rather than the old points system that was used previously. You can add signing bonuses, design incentives for players, and even structure contracts to be even, front-loaded, or back-loaded. Then there is the new coaching system, which actually lets you hire a whole staff, from the head coach, right down to your player scout. There's also a whole new minor-league system that actually lets your minor-league players go through a regular minors season, which gives you the chance to see firsthand how a player performs down in the minor leagues rather than just calling up players simply based on rating. The list of improvements goes on and on, and it ranges from new, improved CPU trade and player-signing logic to apparent fixes for old, lingering issues.