EA has the monopoly in most sports games and it shows. They barely improve their games over the years and not much is done to fix the obvious problems. It's the realism of hockey they have yet to capture, and NHL 11 unfortunately does nothing to change this. The animations are either too stiff or too relaxed, their movement rarely looks natural. Only the goalie is very well done. The crowdEA has the monopoly in most sports games and it shows. They barely improve their games over the years and not much is done to fix the obvious problems. It's the realism of hockey they have yet to capture, and NHL 11 unfortunately does nothing to change this. The animations are either too stiff or too relaxed, their movement rarely looks natural. Only the goalie is very well done. The crowd still looks like Sims in Sims 1. They need to improve this. Unfortunately the physics have not improved. Therefore instead of tripping on a fallen player, you simply "push him" on the ice. Every time you check a player, it's as if there is a cushion that alters the impact of the hit, and checking rarely is fun to do, you have the impression that you didn't deliver a strong enough hit most of the time. There's some problems with noises and sounds. The crowd will sometimes react over something insignificant while you might do something else that could be the promise of a great play, and there's no reaction from the attendance. I don't understand why they are not putting the real coaches behind the bench. Penalties ( especially when playing against the AI ) are often weird. For example, you will check a player during the whistle, and while the game is stopped, he will chase you without hitting you. Doesn't matter, you both get a penalty over this, even if there wasn't any contact after the whistle. The be a pro mode is interesting, but you quickly realize that the "coach" doesn't make his decisions based on the entire team. If you end up moving up or down a line it's only because of what you did, not what the other players did. They need to add a french announcer to Montreal and Ottawa games and they need to put the real songs that are played when a team scores instead of a random song. I know these are very small details, but these details lack in great numbers, and all of them combined remove the realism that most of us are looking for. On another note I would like to point out that EA are greedy as hell. If you buy this game in used form, you must pay to play online. Now that wouldn't be a problem if EA wouldn't shut their servers down a couple of years after the release of most of their games. It's time for EA to step their game up, hire some Canadians who actually know what hockey is and make them recreate this franchise. Right now it looks like a corpse that you keep trying to reanimate and it doesn't look good. For the positive remarks, there are many, many teams to choose from. You can play with CHL teams or european teams, the choices are extremely various. Most of the game modes are fun and well done. Being a General Manager is fun, but it lacks the depth and, especially, algorithms that made Eastside ( a computer game where you'd be a GM ) famous. The songs are all good ones, although some are merely playing in arenas, some other are already famous ( Joe Satriani's song, for example, is often used in arenas in real life ). I kinda wish they could've added some old school stuff like "We Will Rock You" and "The Good Ol' Hockey Game".… Expand
NHL 11Your Score0 out of 10User Score
