A more effective use of your time and money would be to take a hockey stick and bash in your skull. (real review inside)
a 1/10 I must be joking right? No this is seriously the worst game I have ever spent money on EVER! Maybe there are worst games out there such as "big rigs" but as far as I am concerned this takes the cake for several reasons. The EA NHL series has been around such a long time now, and I remember back to the days of the SNES. I even remember playing nhl 2001 on the pc day after day.
The sad thing is NHL 2001 has the same if not better graphics then NHL 2008. I am not joking, and yes I did have everything up all the way. Players look ugly, ice is terrible, sticks, puck, ref, graphical glitches, etc. Graphics arn't everything, but at least make it worthy of a game you made 7 years ago. Heck I would have been happen with graphics along the lines of last gen consoels such as xbox, gamecube etc. These don't even come close.
The sad thing is I only spent 13$ on this, and had incredibly low expectations knewing it was not supose to be near as good as the console version. Even with these low expectations it beat them big time.
Now lets talk about content. Sure it has a fantasy draft, a few different leagues, create a player/team. The real question is does it matter? No it doesn't. Not only have most of these features been around for the longest time cough* nhl 2001. They were even deeper 7 years ago! How do you recycle a game over 7 years, and have less content then what you started with? HOW? someone please explain this to me.
Oh wait the skill stick wasn't in NHL 2001 oh thank god it will save this game. All the skill stick does is move your stick all the way left or right, and you shoot with it. Not overall useful or impressive. Very tacked on, not that the feature itself is "bad" but they should have left it out because it just looks ridiculous. All you do even on the hardest difficulty is skate really slow, moving left right left right up the ice till you score. The best part is even if your moving as slow as possible, if you hold your stick right your player stops skating. For some reason though he never losses momentum. It looks so funny, actually I guess there is something good about this game. It made me laugh at how bad the animations are.
What about the actually gameplay? Well the skillstick is a bad feature but what if you don't use it? how is the AI terrible. There like a bunch of monkies that are blindfolded. They basically don't seem to have a clue with what is going on.
Not to mention things like technical problems such as constant game crashes, that most people experince.
I know it is easier to find things wrong with a game then things good. This game however I just don't know. I can usually not like a game but still find good things about it, like I can see why people may like it, but this.
If you are looking for a more realistic hockey experince on the pc, why not try nhl 2002 or 2001 at least those games didn't suffer from technical problems, and ai retardation.
Better yet, if you really want a recent hockey experince consoles are the way to go nhl 2k8 or nhl 2008 would be excellent choices. If you really want a pc hockey experince, and are a huge hockey nut like me, and can't live without. You will have ot make due with eastside hockey manager 2007.
It may not let you play, but you can manager any nhl ,ahl, chl, international, etc hockey team you want. Incredible game if that is what your into.
A final warning if you play this game you will most likely lose a lot of faith in humanity, and with that note thanks for reading.