So I got it as soon as I could. Second or third day I think. It's the only sports game I buy, I follow other sports too but I am not interested in playing other sports games.
$79. And change. Thats the total that came up as at the Gamestop about 5 minutes from my house. It kind of surprised me. I guess it has been a while since I bought a full priced game. Not that I always buy used, I like to support game developers and all, but I don't remember the last time I payed that much for a game. I guess it is $69 plus tax (stupid HST). I live in Ontario, by the way.
So I had played the demo. It seemed interesting; their new feature, the 'Ultimate Hockey League"! Oh wow. I want to be in the Ultimate Hockey League. That seems so much better than plain old National Hockey League. This is the biggest addition to this year's installment of "NHL". It is actually a pretty cool concept. You get packs of hockey cards that you can use to make a team. You can buy, sell and trade cards, and take your team online to compete against other teams. The concept is very enticing, who doesn't love opening a pack of hockey cards and discovering what (who) is inside? The problem I have found is, as deep and interesting as this mode is (you can track every stat, develop your players and perfect your team) it all just seems to be a funnel to get you to spend money. You can "buy" players on the virtual in-game marketplace with "EA Pucks" (fake money) that you accrue by playing games. Or you can Buy players with real money through PSN or XBL. That is, you can buy packs of player cards for as little as $0.99 which will get you the worst kind of card set, or you can spend more and get a better set.
So, you don't have to spend the money. You can play games and try to accrue enough "Pucks" to get the card sets. From my experience, the highest number of Pucks I have earned has been just over 400 for winning a game online. To get a decent set of cards, with at least 1 good player in the set, you need to spend 2,500 Pucks. This means you have to play and win (Losing netted me half the amount of Pucks) about 6 games. Thats about 20 minutes per game, so 2 hours time to get one set of cards, if you win all of your games. If you lose all of your games it's going to take you about double that time. Most people will probably be somewhere in the middle. So if you are hoping to field one line of NHL players, its going to take you about (3 hours/player * 6 players) 18 hours. Thats your top 6 players; 3 forwards, 2 d-men and 1 goalie. Since you don't know what position player you get in a pack, you can probably guess that time is going to be closer to 30 hours.
So, 30 hours isn't an incredible amount of time to invest in one game. But most of this time is spent playing as bad players. It's like if you played a 3rd person action game and said you were going to be a superstar at the end of the game, but for the first 10 to 15 hours you're going to be a bumbling moron. You can't run fast, you can't shoot straight, you can't jump high and you're always getting your ass kicked. For the next 5 to 10 hours your skills will be marginally better, you might be able to hit your target and can move a little faster. By hour 30 you should be good to go. Now you can play the game as it was intended.
Well, or I could just play one of the other modes, like Be a Pro and play as an NHL caliber player. Which was my favourite mode in NHL 10. Problem is they haven't really improved anything. The menus still get in the games way more often than not. And the feedback you get from the game and "coaches" is exactly the same as it was last year (couldn't they have crunched some more numbers for you). The commentary is the same and the gameplay seems very marginally tweaked. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but all the same tricks for scoring / defending still seem to work. Nothing else is even worth noting. Sticks break. Great.
This is still the best NHL franchise (and only one this year) out there and one of the best sports games around, but it was last year too. It's like they spent 10 months creating the Ultimate Team feature, spent 1 month figuring out how and when sticks should break, then probably the last month celebrating, or something. It's disappointing. I guess it comes with the territory. This isn't exactly uncommon in the world of sports game franchises, but it's been a disappointment for me.
