Starting off as a mulleted 17-year-old from Augusta, Maine, NHL 19 gave me the choice to start in the Canadian Hockey League and work my way up or skip it entirely and go immediately to the NHL Draft. I definitely appreciate the fantastic and intimidating depth here, even if I won’t spend the majority of my NHL 19 time playing it.īe a Pro career mode is my favorite “straight-hockey” way to play. Setting stadium parking for the NHL expansion franchise, along with seating, salary caps, and tons more is part of the experience. The management options are hugely robust, to the point where I was afraid to go any further without building a spreadsheet to keep track of anything. Over in Franchise mode, I spent WAY too much time creating an NHL expansion rebirth for the Hartford Whalers. It’s a nice touch, and I was even able to pull a Tim Horton from one of my free packs. To EA’s credit, Ultimate Team is at least pretty generous with letting you earn card packs, especially if you’ve played an EA NHL game in the past – you get a pretty sweet collection of packs right off the bat as a reward for loyalty. That being said, I’m glad that the damage they do is limited strictly to this mode. Just let me spend my real money buying the packs, not points to redeem for packs. Similarly to NBA Live 19, the cost of new packs are out of whack with the denominations of points offered. I’m not a fan of its microtransactions, nor am I a fan of how its pricing scheme is laid out. Hockey Ultimate Team is here once again, and it’s par for the course. The cost of new packs are out of whack with the denominations of points offered. After playing online, I know I need to spend some serious time in training if I hope to break my losing streak in Ones. The training mode doesn’t cover all the possibilities, but an adaptive hint system will fill you in during gameplay, showing how and when to execute certain moves. Once again, NHL 19 has a thorough training mode, showing you how to pull off every move, from basic passing and shooting to advanced, ridiculous through-the-legs tricks. But even when it looks delightfully absurd, it retains the solid, fast, and fun gameplay at the core of NHL 19. Threes retains the same ridiculousness as last year, thanks to arcade-style gameplay and the opportunity to unlock and play as mascots. NHL Threes has a similar arcade style but, thankfully, can be played in single-player as well as local co-op or online. Ones mode seems like it would be incredibly well suited to local game matchups, so it’s a bummer that it’s limited to online play only. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in a hockey game, and I was smiling the entire length of every match up. I found myself waiting for my opponents to tie up so I could skate at them, top-speed, to throw the kind of body check that would get me thrown off the ice in any other mode. It’s a fast, arcade-style online mode where you can play as dirty as you want. It’s an absolute free-for-all on a frozen pond, with three players pitted against one another and all of them battling the CPU-controlled goalie. EA Sports Ones is far and away my favorite of the excellent online modes.ĮA Sports Ones is far and away my favorite of the excellent online modes, beating out Drop-in Threes and EASHL league mode for that title. Somewhat confusingly, there’s more than one mode requiring a custom created hockey player, but annoyingly, you can’t use the same guy for both for some reason. The sheer amount of options is staggering, to the point where it’s pretty much guaranteed no two players will look the same. Many of the customization options are locked behind tasks and challenges, but they’re not prohibitively difficult so unlocking them is a satisfying treat rather than a chore. But it gets way more granular than that, right down to the color of the laces on your skates and the tape on your stick, which can be independently set for the shaft and the blade. It’s disappointing that you can only choose from premade faces, but I’m impressed at how thoroughly you can personalize your custom players, especially the different options for authentic hockey-player mullets. It’s also overflowing with choice, from a generous number of modes (both online and offline) to a dizzying number of create-a-player options.
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