From the get go, NHL 16 looks gorgeous and is what you’d want a current generation hockey game to look like. Cutscenes get a little framey, and the cloth physics on the jersey don’t look perfect, but otherwise the presentation is great. The crowds are among the best put together that I’ve seen in a sports game. They’ve also brought in the NBC commentary and presentation. The presentation is an upgrade, although I do think Doc Emmerick sounds a little sleepy - some commentators do have a harder time bringing across the emotion in their voice when they are recording lines in a studio and it shows here. Live the Life and Be a Legend are gone and while Be a Pro is still around there’s a lot missing from that mode as well. For example, when you create your player you no longer have the option to play any games in Juniors leading up to the Draft.
Your only options are to pick the NHL 16 team you want to play for or let the Draft run and go to whatever team randomly picks you. You never play in the minors in this mode, you can’t get sent down and there is no All-Star Game. All pretty big knocks against a favored mode for many players, but the likely deal breaker is that there is no option to sim to the next shift. When you get to the bench, you’re stuck there until your line is up again. If you get benched, you’re stuck watching until the end of the game. This is not good, to put it mildly. Another oddity I ran across is that I was drafted as a third line Center with pretty mediocre abilities. Yet every game (so far) I’m on the ice for the opening Face-off, the top Penalty Kill and Power Play and I end up with more ice time than anyone else on the team, even with getting off the ice when I’m supposed to.
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Said developer's touting of new puck physics and improved animations is, in the face of so many missing elements, patronizing. Given that this is a franchise that has been at the forefront of sports game innovation for the past five years or more, the state of NHL 16 makes me more sad than angry. I thought we had a good thing going here. Now it's over? The most crushing feature is the lack thereof. Why is there no online team play, for instance? For years now it has been my go-to mode, the one with the greatest depth and most rewarding successes. It stood as a shining example to other games trying to do anything remotely similar, Alas it's gone.
Modes were missing only for some to be patched in later. All in all, it was a terrible experience for the consumer and the lack of inclusion of the EA Sports Hockey League, a popular online mode, really hurt the franchise with some fans. On Tuesday, EA Sports officially announced details of its features for NHL 16, which will release in September on PS4 and XBox One, with watered down "Legacy Edition" versions coming out for PS3 and XBox 360 gamers. Gameplay-wise, NHL 16 touts brand new puck physics which really do make a difference. The team behind it actually went out and enlisted a scientist who worked on the Large Hedron Collider to help them revamp the title’s puck physics. I shit you not, they really went to that great length, which is to be applauded.
Thankfully, the work paid off, because pucks now behave in a much more realistic manner. They bounce and hop after failing to land flat, ricochet off of players’ jerseys and do other tricks that you’d associate with actual hockey. Visually NHL 16 looks fantastic. Players look more realistic than ever before thanks to layered rendering that makes clothing moves more accurately. Facial expressions are detailed and look less hollow than in previous iterations. Commentators look photo-realistic and that’s because they are. NBC Sports’ Doc Emerick and Eddie Olczyk replace Gary Thorne and Bill Clemet, but instead of voiced computer rendering, EA has decided to use real film of them in front of a green screen, filling the background with in-game renderings of the current match-up.
Quite honestly, this tactic should become standard. No matter how far graphics come along, it will never match honest-to-goodness reality, and having video recordings of real human begins is inherently less creepy. For everyone suckered - oops, I mean, for everyone who chose to subscribe to EA Access for the Xbox One (because Sony only wants quality services on the PS4), you can grab NHL 16 for free from the EA Vault.
