Review by: Todd Brakke

NHL 10 continues the trend of quality hockey game releases from EA Sports. Although its off-ice gameplay still needs work, the consistent, year-to-year improvement of the action on the ice makes it an easy game to recommend for both casual video hockey aficionados and die-hards.

Perhaps the best trait of NHL 10 is the fact that it’s easy to tweak it to suit a variety of play styles. If you miss the old days, in which this series played more like WWF on ice, with lots of big hits, insanely fast gameplay and the sort of tape-to-tape passing that would make Toe Blake proud were it humanly possible, you can have it. If you want a game that’s much closer to authentic NHL action, where shots and passes miss their mark, players don’t move down the ice at something approximating the speed of sound, and players can take a hit without being sent sprawling across the ice, then NHL 10 can accommodate you.

Even better, achieving these different styles doesn’t require endless tweaking of a multitude of gameplay sliders, thanks to the inclusion of not only a game difficulty setting, but also a Game Styles setting that dictates how much like a sim you want the game to play (Casual, Default, Normal, or Hardcore). Used in conjunction with each other, these two sliders alone have a huge impact on the kind of experience you get when playing NHL 10 and, should you want to tweak further, all the usual gameplay sliders are still present.

Two other new additions to the gameplay also make it nigh impossible to accept going back to last year’s edition: board pinning and precision (manual) passing. Watch any NHL game and you’ll continually see players pin the puck and each other along the boards around the net in an attempt to control possession of the puck. No hockey game has ever really modeled this aspect of professional hockey with any degree of authenticity, but NHL 10 pulls it off such that successfully making use of this feature is essential at containing the CPU, but abusing it by trying to hold up players away from the puck is sure to draw a holding penalty. It is simply impossible to overstate how much board pinning adds to the gameplay experience.

The aforementioned precision passing also adds a new dimension to the gameplay. Where in previous editions the AI attempted to interpret where you intended for a pass to go, turning off this AI assistance makes it possible to better execute lead passing and direct passes off the boards, neither of which were possible before. This feature is a bit more difficult to use since it’s very easy to inadvertently send passes the wrong way and give up a costly turnover, but it’s also well worth the effort. The default camera view adds to this problem since, when playing the puck deep in the offensive zone, you have no view of your defenseman at the blue line, making passes to the point something of a crapshoot. Fortunately, switching to the Classic camera view negates that particular issue.