A Great Hockey Game that you Can't Play.
Unfortunately, that is not the case with this particular title. Many XBox 360 owners have discovered the frustrations of the constant lock-ups that happen as you try to play the game.
This is real shame, as the game has so much potential. While the graphics aren't stellar, the animations are incredibly fluid, and more than make up for the lack of glossy graphics. The worst downfall is that every coach looks the same, just with different hair colors and eye colors.
2K7 has an outstanding camera angle that is probably the best one ever put into a hockey game. It keeps you closer to the action without missing where your teammates are located. Sound in the game (especially on a surround-sound system with a decent sub woofer) is very good. You can hear everything with crystal clarity from the roar of the crowd to the skates sliding across the ice to the slap-shots. The commentators are really lackluster, but you can shut them off. They even offer a new mode where the music will escalate and decline with the action.
The controls are highly complex, which is incredible for advanced players but very hard on first-timers. That's okay, however, because you can adjust the difficulty accordingly to play at your speed until you familiarize yourself with the game. Then you can go at full force.
Gameplay is incredibly rich with several different modes from "Season" to "Franchise". You can trade players, change lines, and adjust difficulty "sliders" for just about every variable you can think of, or you can simply leave them at factory settings if you'd rather no have to play around. With all this potential, the one area where 2k fell short was in the quality control department. Much like the ill-fated MLB2K6, also developed by Kush Games, the game constantly freezes for no apparent reason, the referee drops the puck and neither team is there for the face-off, and sometimes you lose your entire offensive line.
2k's customer service just makes things worse. When you call them, they simply blame the 360 for the issue, and tell you to call Microsoft or send your system back. A really bad problem becomes even worse when your other games start to lock up, and you then have to remove all of the NHL2K7 save files from your hard drive.
A great game should not have fought with this much. As a result, I ended up returning my copy of 2K7 for EA's NHL07(which plays just fine, by the way).
In short, rent this game for the 360 before buying the game and test it out. You may find this one has more technical glitches than you can handle.