Despite its status as a distant fourth in the realm of North American team sports, hockey video games remain among the most enjoyable and exciting sports games on the market. For a number of years the NHL 2k series eclipsed EA’s NHL franchise as the Stanley Cup champion of quality video hockey action. But with last year’s resurgence of the EA franchise, the NHL 2k series has finally found itself facing some real competition. With NHL 2k9, 2k Sports has put out an authentic, enjoyable hockey experience that is well worth the price of admission.

The most striking thing this year is that it just flat out plays a better game of hockey than its predecessor. NHL 2k8 had serious issues with playing sound positional defense. Also, the ease with which you could deliver bone crunching hits could leave the game playing like a demolition derby on ice. No more. (So long as you play on the All-Star difficulty.) Opposing forwards cover the defensemen when you have the puck in the offensive zone, smartly challenging the puck carriers and clogging up passing lanes. The check button is no longer a license to knock a player clear out of his skates.

Instead, the game forces you to be measured and responsible when delivering checks as it’s easy to miss, leaving you hopelessly out of position. But also, even if you deliver a direct hit, it’s not a sure thing that you’ll knock the opposing player off the puck, let alone drive them to the ice. Even more significant, puck physics are also the best I’ve seen in a hockey game, which is crucial in producing a believable hockey simulation. The game still needs work in terms of making dumping and chasing the puck in the offensive zone a more workable option, and there needs to be more pinning of the puck along the boards, but these are not glaring issues. The best test of a hockey game’s smarts is how it looks when you let the AI play against itself and NHL 2k9 does a marvelous job.

What is lacking, however, is variety in goal scoring. It’s not obvious or egregious, but the variety of ways you’ll see the puck reach the back of the net is a bit too rigid. By far the easiest way to get the puck past the goalie is to line up a shot from directly in front of the net. On All-Star difficulty and higher, that’s easier said than done and obviously the closer you are to the net, the better you percentage of tickling the twine should be. But it just seems a bit too important because shots from within the face off circles, shots from near the blue line, and especially shots from steep angles to the sides of the net just about never light the lamp. What makes this especially frustrating is that it makes it extremely difficult to turn talented defensemen into legitimate scoring threats since high powered slap shots from just inside the blue line just won’t go in without a deflection.

Penalties are also a problem. First, while there are games where you’ll see the AI get its share of 2-minute minors, most of the time the ref’s whistle is clearly working against you. This isn’t a killer since every few games or so this trend will reverse itself, but it is noticeable. What can get annoying, though, is that the vast majority of penalties whistled (that don’t involve fighting) are all of the tripping variety. Without extreme changes to the penalty configuration sliders, just about everything is a trip. Worse, the game just doesn’t understand what an Interference call looks like as you can check players away from the puck with impunity without a whistle. This allows you to make life much harder for your opponent than it should be because you can just lay out any player who tries to park in front of the net with the only risk being the very occasional roughing call. The NHL has gone far out of its way to reduce the amount of obstruction players face away from the puck and that’s something developer Visual Concepts needs to replicate in future editions of this series.