[Yamer]

I picked the game up (and the Xbox One) on Tuesday and wanted to wait to play a bit before I commented on the game. I know I'm not exactly saying anything that hasn't already been said here, but I feel like weighing in anyhow.

This is, relative to contemporary context and the trajectory of the series, one of the worst NHL games produced by this company. I do not get the praise in gameplay. To me, while it looks sleeker, it plays like a clunkier version of previous iterations. The AI is absolutely atrocious. My players rarely follow the play, and when they do they skate right into coverage, which is incredibly irritating. They also go offside way, WAY to much. I never had that sort of trouble in previous games. Defence is essentially crossing your fingers and hoping for the best as they continue to neglect this area of the user experience. We don't have enough or proper tools to play defence and it mostly consists of trying to stay in position and hoping something goes right.

I see that EA continues to compensate for their programming deficiencies by essentially creating a challenging scenario by simply giving the CPU capabilities and advantages unavailable to the user. CPU defenders merely have to be within 3-4 feet of your players to make defensive plays. Passes and shots are stunted for no other apparent reason than the CPU controlled defender is near me. They don't even have to have good position. For example, I magically flub shots when a CPU-controlled player is well behind me and it's physically impossible to make that sort of play on my forward. And if I hit one more post I might scream until my throat caves in.

Not really a fan of the menus or the commentary. I'm sure my frustration with the menus is partly due to my familiarity with the old system, but I really dislike the 'drop-down' style of cycling through options and am more than just a little peeved at the general unresponsiveness (or lag?) of the menu switching. They have also removed the page-up/page-down feature that was so useful. Moreover, the layout of the screens in Be A GM mode are all wrong. They need to re-merge the weekly calender on the main screen and have quick-view access to news, transactions, summaries, etc. The commentary seems stilted and slopped together. It's already getting a little grinding and repetitive. Sometimes change for the sake of change isn't a good thing.

The feature removal goes without saying...but I'll reiterate it anyway. The game feels like a hollowed out husk.

This is a bad game from one corner to the next, and if the only saving grace I had was that the gameplay was improved and enjoyable then I'm a lost soul, so to speak. It's not fun, it has little to no replay value (at this time, anyway), and it's not near the innovative jump to the next generation that it needs to be. This gives me absolutely zero confidence in this franchise going forward.