NHL 07 is not by any means a bad game, but there are better hockey games out there. It fails to improve in a lot of areas from NHL 06, in fact, aside from a few features the games are exactly identical. This is somewhat common in sports games, but if you look at any other EA franchise, most notably Madden, there are usually noticeable difference at least in features if not the gameplay. There was a lot about NHL 06 that needed to be fixed that just simply wasn't for some reason. The most noticeable change is the use of the right analogue stick for passing. Unfortunately, it's not an overly useful feature. Many times, it will pass the puck to the same player regardless of where you actually tilt the analogue stick. Also, flip passes are harder to execute in my opinion, as you now have push in the right analogue stick, without accidently tilting it in any direction before it's pushed in. The nice thing about this, is that it allows you to pass in the direction you want without breaking stride. It's not perfect, but if EA worked on it, it'd be a very nice thing to have. The other big changes involve goalies and one-timers. One-timers are considerably less accurate than before. It's also far from a sure-fire way to score goals. One-timers from the slot are still pretty reliable, but hard to pull of at harder difficulty levels. Goaltending has gotten worse, if you can believe it. It's not uncommon for the computer to score 3 goals on 8 shots. The computer's goalies aren't much better. While there's no "trick" to scoring this year like there typically has been in the past, goalies tend to let in more slapshots from the point, or wrist shots taken while skating across the crease. This both adds and detracts realism in the game. Defensemen are now able to score without having to skate to the front of the net, and screening the goalie does seem to help, but the sheer number of pucks that go in (and sometimes the way they go in) just takes most of the realism out of it. Aside from those things, the game plays the same as last years. In Dynasty mode your GM now has a personality that determines how fast you can get upgrades. Menus are still painfully slow to navigate. The response time between button presses and it's effect on the screen is very noticeable on the menu screens. The graphics are exactly the same as last year's game. They are fairly decent given that it's on "out-dated" technology. Not great graphics, but they're solid. The commentary is sub-par. The play by play is decent enough, but aside from that there's nothing. It's very dry and repetitive. As I said before, this isn't a bad game but not first on the list of hockey games I'd recommend to people.
I just picked up the game yesterday and have only really played one game so far (the Rangers/Devils matchup that is my first game every season lol), but I enjoyed it. I set the control scheme back to last year's so I co... Read Full Review
Gameplay: It is an awsome game. I loved how they changed the controls. This way it makes it more of a challenge! They also made the dynasty mode that you can also use the European leages too! In the dynasty mode you have... Read Full Review
