NHL 2005

Since there isn’t going to be a hockey season this year, the next best thing is to play through a virtual season on your Xbox. NHL 2005 from Electronic Arts is a gorgeous looking hockey simulator that features a ton of modes, including a mode that allows you to participate in this year’s World Cup of Hockey, and has all of the players, arenas, and everything else you could want ... except solid gameplay. NHL 2005 is a fun hockey title, but it shouldn’t be your first choice.

The gameplay in NHL 2005 is at the same time fresh and innovative but also seriously flawed. In this year’s game, you have two buttons for shots - one for slapshots and one for wrist shots. This allows you to make the right shot at the right time and have a better chance of scoring a goal. You can also make wraparound shots when you are in behind the net, and this feature is awesome since it takes the game that much closer to being just like you see on TV. Another great addition to the game is the focus on creating open ice. At any time, you can switch to another player and guide them to an open position and then call for a pass. This is a great way to set up all kinds of plays and it gives you a real feeling of control.

There are a few annoying problems, however, that drag the experience down. The defensive AI is really freaking difficult on all but the lowest difficulty setting and you have to rely on a lot of long shots and simple luck to score. The AI also throws an insane amount of checks, which is annoying and rather unrealistic. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but the game almost never calls penalties and the end result is a hockey game that is a lot more frustrating than it should be. If you have to fight cheap AI and spend most of your time being frustrated instead of having fun, the best gameplay in the world isn’t going to save your experience, and that is the problem with NHL 2005. Playing against other people either in multiplayer or via Xbox Live solves a lot of these problems, but the single player game is the main attraction and it simply isn’t as good as it should be.

The main single-player mode is the team building dynasty mode, but it suffers from quite a few problems that will likely turn off hardcore hockey fans and frustrate the rest of us. In a dynasty mode, you have control of a team over the course of several seasons and you are responsible for keeping the fans as well as the team owner happy. NHL 2005 separates teams into three categories – team, profit, and ambition. Ambitious teams want to win at all costs. Profit teams want to make money no matter what. And Team franchises are loyal to their players no matter their record or how much money the team makes. At the beginning of dynasty mode, you are given an objective based on what kind of team you choose. A team like Detroit is willing to do anything to win while a team like Chicago is more concerned with money or getting the number one draft pick no matter what (which means you have to be the worst team in the league).

If you pick a team other than Detroit, New Jersey, Colorado, or other similar big market teams that give you free reign to win at all costs, you are basically screwed. If you are given the objective to get the number one draft pick, for example, you are basically being ordered to lose. That isn’t any fun. You have to play through a couple of seasons and make your owner happy before you’ll be able to go out and get the players you want in order to win. That means you have to simulate a ton of games instead of playing them, which isn’t too fun. What all of this boils down to is that if your favorite team isn’t in the ambition category when you start, you have to do a ton of work and go through a ton of crap before dynasty mode really becomes any good. And you can’t turn off the category system or the objectives your owner gives you. For casual hockey fans, that is seriously the pits and really isn’t all that entertaining if your favorite team isn’t already a proven winner.