NHL 18 review: Games of Threes, let them be

It was once feared that we wouldn’t receive an NHL 18 this year. After incremental updates and a new gameplay mode, who truly knows if we did.

Developer: EA Canada
Publisher: EA Sports
Platforms: PS4 (version reviewed), Xbox One
Release Date: September 15, 2017

As a good ol’ Canadian, hockey was a big part of my formative life. I remember everyone talking about the last game at Maple Leaf Gardens before it eventually became the Loblaws it is today (what a travesty). I remember learning how to curse over Bryan McCabe flubbing one-timers from the blue line. I knew of disappointment when Mats Sundin left the Maple Leafs to play for the Vancouver Canucks. Most importantly to me today, the old EA Sports NHL games helped bridge the gap between appreciation of sports and games.

While I haven’t personally owned a copy of this series since Markus Naslund was on the cover and “Automatic Girl” was playing every twelfth song, it remains a staple among casual gaming sports friends here in Toronto. Getting the opportunity to play NHL 18 for an extended pre-launch look, I was glad to see the huge jump in improvements over the past decade.

Having looked back at NHL 17 to do a compare and contrast, however, it’s a bit unfortunate that feature upgrades haven’t been as monumental on a year-to-year basis.

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Hockey Canada’s Training Camp was a perfect re-introduction to NHL 18 at large, bringing hockey’s greatest international program to serve as a skill trainer tutorial. Not only do they show real hockey players pulling off the moves, but give a great gameplay demonstration of the actions in motion.

It’s perfect for some of NHL 18’s new offensive and defensive moves, with advanced dekes and stick control being offered to the player. In addition to treating the right stick as if you’re manipulating your hockey player’s stick defensively, you can also enter fighting game combo-esque quarter circles for some truly complicated counters to defenders.

Hockey players can weave their way with the best athletes in the world, so it’s great to see EA Sports expand what players can do. Pulling off a Peter Forsbergian shootout stick drag or Marek Malikian behind-the-legs shot is phenomenally difficult to pull off smoothly, but pays off brilliantly with its immersive gameplay.

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While NHL 18 commits to more realistic hockey in their games, EA Canada has been great at keeping hockey weird. NHL Threes is a new casual and online competitive mode where players can get together, online and offline, to play with the three best offensive players from each NHL team (plus their goalie) to face off in a smaller ice hockey arena with full arcade style.

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It combines the feel of 3 on 3 NHL Arcade with the presentation of an NBA Street, allowing players to face off against NHL combinations in a circuit, with three live players per online team or with four players in couch co-op. There’s one face off per period, with the rest being live, possession-based hockey.

With the smaller arena, the game of hockey becomes a lot more calculated. Pushing for an all-out attack could easily turn into a two-on-none if it gets broken up. With money pucks both granting extra goals and possibly reducing opponents’ scores, mascots entering play and an announcer busting chops, you get an unreal throwback arcade experience that feels well designed.

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As great as the current 31-team structure is for the game of hockey right now, NHL 18 allows players to expand that number with a 32nd franchise. The game also has an option to pull off yet another expansion draft, letting players make their own Vegas Golden Knights in addition to regular Franchise and Season modes.

One excellent final point about NHL 18 is the game’s menu. It’s a lot sleeker than other games, providing two main screens in which you can reach the entire game’s content. You can tag three of your favorite gameplay modes to the front menu, allowing you to tailor to what you play most. On the bottom screen, you can see everything within the game set up in boxes, with each column dictating the sub genre for each gameplay mode or submenu. It’s a subtle touch, but subtlety is preferred over garish inefficiency.

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Although I had a pleasant time playing NHL 18, it doesn’t come without its downfalls. The Be A Pro Career mode is woefully behind what single-player campaigns offer these days, even for EA Sports standards. Beyond creating a player, following coach objectives and trying to become the best in the league, it’s deeply inadequate compared to the realism and focus of others sports games’ single player experiences.

…Being able to make Mike Emrick and Eddie Olzyk sound stale and unimaginative is a Herculean feat of a misstep.

There’s just no way a rookie right-winger is going to get drafted 19th overall in the 2017 draft at 71 OVR and make his way to the 1st line on the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins after six or so pre-season games. The “addition” of the ability to request a trade in your create-a-player is at least a decade old for sports games, something quite baffling to a seasoned “Road To The Show” player. This, in addition to the lack of even an attempt at a narrative, leaves me completely unenthused.

I used to think the repetitive, oft-recycled broadcasting lines from the MLB The Show series were unimpressive, but NHL 18 takes the cake. Sure, there’s a lot of in-motion gameplay that makes hockey hard to predict for a video game’s mock broadcast, but being able to make Mike Emrick and Eddie Olzyk sound stale and unimaginative is a Herculean feat of a misstep.

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The most egregious downside of EA Sports titles continues to be the Ultimate Teams and its extreme NHL points microtransactions. I’m sure the main reason HUT has been so focused on in re-tooling of its functionality to allow 3v3 gameplay is to incentivize people to care enough to drop $100 USD ($133 CAD) on packs in order to gamble and win the best players in packs.