The best part of NHL 16 is playing offense, while everything associated with playing defense is an exercise in extreme frustration. In that way, the game perfectly captures real hockey. Auto-deking is great, and winding up and shooting with the analog stick feels extremely solid. It's a real challenge to break through opposing defenses, and your AI foes do an excellent job of keeping you to the peripheral areas of the ice, just like good teams do in the real NHL. With next-gen visuals and updates to the Skill Stick feature, “NHL 16” continues its reign of domination with an awesome professional hockey experience, even if it puts itself in the penalty box a few times with mistakes you wouldn’t expect from a veteran team like EA Sports.
Case in point- cycling the puck on the power play is a joy to behold, the same way protecting the front of your net while shorthanded requires patience and skill. Those who want to skate from one end of the ice to the other would best be served to pick up “NHL Rock the Rink” instead- it basically doesn’t happen in this game. With killer visuals and refined and polished gameplay, “NHL 16” rules the ice on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Alongside the graphical leap, one of the major all-stars in NHL 16 is the presentation. Unlike most sports games that have a commentary crew created with in-game models, including the recent Madden NFL 15 with Jim Nance and Phil Simms, NHL 15 actually chose to record the new NBC Sports commentary team of Mike ‘Dock” Emrick and Eddie Olczyk themselves. This does look a little bit awkward at first as the real life commentators are put in front of the in-game background, but getting them like this is well worth that transition period.
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But it doesn't. The absolute bare bones for a modern sports game are there, from the Be A Manager and Be A Pro modes, and these do offer some fun. At the same time, these modes feel like they were stripped of the options longtime fans of the series might be looking for. Building a team now acts like it is on training wheels, and when you're taking control of the career of a single player in the Be A Pro mode, you're forced to sit there and watch the entire game even when your player is currently sitting on the sidelines. Even cricket games allow players to skip through to when their character is directly involved in the player career mode, and they're built on a fraction of NHL's budget.
The AI has also seen some improvement with players moving to set up positions on their own and creating their own passing lanes. They’re also prone to make mistakes, missing passes, causing penalties on their own accord and so on. The AI isn’t perfect by any means, but from what I’ve played, it’s a step ahead of NHL 15 in many ways as I certainly recall being a heck of a lot more frustrated with the AI in NHL 15 than I have been in 16. Even Be A Pro, a mode that’s actually featured in NHL 16, has been heavily stripped down. Customization is pretty much non-existent and the AHL has been stripped from the game. So basically, you create a player to play in the NHL and that’s it. It’s inexcusable, really, to cut down a game to the bare minimum of features and content and not provide an explanation of why, or if and when these features will return to the game.
Most gamers will agree that this is an unwelcomed outcome in and of itself, but it’s one that’s harder to accept when this new console generation has also brought higher retail costs for consumers. While I am not absolving the programmers, engineers, artists, or producer Sean Ramjagsingh of their roles in this game’s development, I feel like most of the issues with NHL 15 could have been solved by having one more year of development time. The release date of a game is usually decided by people in business suits holding the purse strings, and I just wish to make sure that they’re acknowledged for their part in this as well.
Overall, NHL 16 is a masterpiece. It’s a beautiful game, that is fun to play and it has excellent controls. Of course, you need to remember it’s not a sequel as much as it is a refining, so don’t buy it if you have last year’s version. There is only one thing to complain about and that’s the music and announcers. EA should have got Bob Cole and Harry Neal, and Don Cherry should be in there somewhere, but this is just me being a stickler – the game is not hurt at all by these guys. Although, after playing for a weekend non-stop, I have never heard the word ‘recoil’ used so much in relation to hockey before. Plus, they do have Ray Ferarro and he is great. If he read his lines and they weren’t just used from actual broadcasts, then he should get into acting. He is very, very good here.
