“I’m gonna make Gretzky’s head bleed for super fan 99 over here…”
The days of pop culture references and having a few friends over to sit down and go toe-to-toe in a game of NHL 94 have unfortunately long since passed the sport of professional hockey by. Much to hockey fans’ collective chagrins, you’d be hard pressed to convince most of today’s North American sports fans to turn on the boob tube and watch the San Jose Sharks wage a tooth-loosening 60 minute battle against the Boston Bruins over, say, a Nascar race or one of those ever engaging rounds of Squirrel Wake-Boarding on ESPN 8 “The Ocho”. That is of course to say that the NHL, while currently gaining ground, has yet to reach the popularity it once held in the mid-90’s. With this in mind, EA sets out to try and reclaim its arcade style glory days and popularity with NHL 3 on 3 Arcade.
3 on 3 throws fans of the sport an intensely energy-filled game of pond hockey where you’re buried in over-the-top monkey sound effects, gameplay paced so quickly it’d make even AO blush with jealousy and all the while filling the entire video game industries quota for ‘giant head mode’ for the next calendar year. Unfortunately, EA manages to deliver only the base of what they undoubtedly were shooting for and fall extremely short when it comes to the bells and whistles that you’ll find in most of today’s sports games.
The on-ice action is where 3 on 3 shines brightest. Featuring a simplistic control method (alongside a more ‘complex’ configuration for NHL 09 vets), a wickedly fast-paced on ice product, and a gaggle of fairly cliché video game power-ups running the gambit from super speed, super checking, super shot, tiny goalie, gigantic goalie to a banana peel or two alongside a few others that help to solidify the arcade focused gameplay – all of which add up to an extremely enjoyable multiplayer game on and offline. Online you’re given the choice of playing 1 on 1 or up to as many as 3 on 3 with each human player controlling a player on the ice in either ranked or unranked game modes. Sadly you won’t find any online tournament, season or franchise modes to prolong the online joy and this game truly could have used some more oomph online to help make up for the (even more so) lacking singleplayer experience.
The (as in one, singular) offline mode is nothing more than the common cannon fodder of the genre. Labelled as “play now” but better known as the mode you overlook in every other sports game on the market when looking to enjoy a single player experience offers up the absolute bare minimum when it comes to features. After booting it up you’ll find yourself faced with yet another major detracting factor found in EA’s attempt at capturing the light side of the NHL; the absolutely piss-poor roster. You’re given two choices for teams, red & blue – both of which vaguely resemble the jerseys worn in last year’s NHL All-Star game. After selecting the team color of your choice, you’re given the option of choosing three NHL ’stars’ from a roster of 36 players and then one of four goalies to round out your team. 40 NHL players. In a league of roughly 1000 players, you’re given the choice between 40 of the ‘best’ (Nik Antropov?…hardly) players to lace up the skates. Once you’ve decided who’ll take the ice for your legendary Team Red you’re given the opportunity to fiddle around with the options with no real surprises here. You’re given a few different difficulties to choose from, disable or enable power-ups, what camera angle you’d like to view the action from etc. It’s all typical genre options and do nothing to make 3 on 3 stand out in the least.
It’s hard to recommend a game, even when it costs a meagre 10 dollars, when what you’re paying for essentially boils down to what you’d expect from a demo or what you would have found in a 2K sports game nearly a decade ago after entering a ‘big-head’ cheat and boosting the gameplay speed up to max. What’s here is great, but sadly what isn’t is what this game will be measured on. The gameplay is fast and enjoyable, but the features and modes included just aren’t enough to keep even the most die-hard hockey fans entertained past an hour or two which irks me in just the right way as any hockey fan surely realizes the potential behind the concept of 3 on 3. I’ll leave this game installed on my harddrive for the occasional time that I return home far too intoxicated to grasp NHL 09’s complexity.