Sorry but someone has to blow the whistle on this!! Skill Stick is a great idea but when the game is soooo broken...what

User Rating: 6.6 | NHL 07 X360
By juggalo | Review Date:
I gotta say, I was buzzed when I heard...an innovation in Ice Hockey videogaming.....INCREDIBLE. When I saw the skillstick in action I thought WOW!! The 2K games have for years been the bastion o great gameplay and multi-player thrills for the majority of hockey fans, with EA offering a slightly more arcadey, brashand loud alternative. Over the pond here 2K's games were seen as being "Canadian" versus EA's very "American" series.

So as 2K7 was delayed til October over here I picked up NHL 07. And boy was I let down. The skill stick is a great idea but in practice it just doesnt match the rest of EA's game. First up, graphically the game isnt as hot as I had thought it was. Yews the cut scenes are incredible...but they are just cut scenes. The actual on-ice is blocky and glitches all the time, with players lacking solidity and seemingly having a force field around them that stops them from actually connecting in hits. To top it off we have one of the worst selections of camera angles I've seen in sports game since before NHL 99, something I really really thought had been fixed years ago (at least it had in the 2K games).

Sonically the game is lovely with great crowd noise and pings off the post but the commentary from the excellent ESPN team falls very very flat compared to their past efforts and repeats over and over and over. The on-ice sound is particularly bland with skating and hitting noises not living up to the goal post and slapshot sound quality.

The skating engine is THE worst thing here. Its sluggish, ugly, doesn't feel like skating in any way and makes dekeing and manouvers up the ice look like the players are stuck in mud.

The controls aside from the skillstick are twitchy and inaccurate and hitting is quite possibly the sorst I've seen in years (it has no feeling, no feedback, and sometimes very little effect)

Online, it hangs together ok, but rebounds happen WAY too often and the goalies controls as totally ineffective and random. The game often resets t oface off and lock ups are quite frequent.

All in all I would say this is a step back. The skill stick is indeed great fun but when its attached to a game so broken, so crippled by bad production values and QC.....its a real shame.

For this year at least I will stick with button shooting....the 2K7 demo alone has rubbished 07's efforts so I think the full game will do very nicely.

Thanks for your time...rant over

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