by houdinisangel » September 12th, 2011, 12:09 pm
Single Player BAP
I'm liking it more than previous years. You have a couple of options to either play a full season in the CHL and then hit the NHL entry draft or you can skip straight to the Memorial Cup, play 3 games and then move right into the NHL entry draft. Pretty standard from there. You have the option to text sim or sim until your next shift and they really did a good job with the camera angles not getting screwed up this year. If you are not a patient man and try to skip through the thousand cut scenes by mashing the A button...you will freeze the game. Nice job fuckers!
EASHL
I love the ability to actually tie up someone in front of the net on D (when it works) and the same goes for offensive screens this year. Unfortunately what EA forgot was that this is pointless when an entire team can crash the net at full acceleration and penalties for goalie intereference are not called because they are pushing the D into the net.
Goalie fights are cool, but when the goalie fights he still gets to play the remainder of the game while his unsuspecting RW now gets to sit out for 5 minutes and be replaced by a computer (who naturally is STILL afraid to cross the blueline with the puck).
The ability to build an EASHL pro at each position so you can quickly switch player types is a great thought. However every time you unlock a new boost you have to adjust for every character posisiton rather than a global replace/update. Also, there is no longer the ability to play an out of position character (ie. no more Sniper builds playing Defense, no more 2Way Fwds back on D). The drawback to this is that once again, the D character builds were not improved from years past...there was a reason WHY we used offensive player builds on D.
The Challenge Club feature is now only unranked games so teams shouldn't be able to win trade like in years past. Also, I have to give them credit, the matchup feature did a good job of matching with appropriate ranked teams and matchups in a timely manner. No longer was I playing lobby for an hour before finding a game.
The incremental leveling up is a good idea for the not so diehard fan. The drawback is that if you have multiple builds, you are going to be XP'd to death having to distribute 90xp across 5 characters every 5 games.
In 24 games played, I counted 5 face-off loops and/or glitched out games. EA FTW!
HUT
Won't be playing it. You have enough of my money EA.
It may not sound like it, but there is a lot of good in this game. If you haven't purchased a version in a few years...you are going to LOVE it. If you pick it up every year you are going to love it initially depending on which game modes you frequent, and pull out your hair (if any) at the constant mistakes that EA makes and refuses to fix from year to year.
