Review by: William Abner

Last year, I called NHL 11 “The best game EA Sports has ever made” and looking back on it I still feel that way. Even with its flaws, NHL 11 was a monumental step for the franchise. So how do you follow that up? It’s a risky thing to try and remake a game as good as NHL 11 – so do you reinvent the wheel or just give it a tune up?

EA Sports has opted for the latter as NHL 12, while it does have its share of improvements to the basic formula, is more of a tweaking than a reinvention of the series. It’s hard to blame EA for doing this, because NHL 11 was such a success from a business standpoint the company would be silly to screw with it too much.

What’s frustrating is that certain game modes, most noticeably the “Be a GM” (franchise) mode has the same issues as last year: simmed results that are a bit too random, good free agents rated in the low 80s that languish in the free agent pool and CPU line AI that leaves a lot to be desired. Additionally, too many players still play the full 82 games in a schedule. Want a day off? Suck it up, buddy. What are we paying you for?

Still, Be a GM is a deep mode – there’s a ton of stuff going on but if you’re coming into NHL 12 with the hopes of a revamped and franchise mode, you may as well stick with NHL 11. In fact the same can be said for Ultimate Team – the addictive card collecting side game, which remains a blast to play but has received minimal tweaks, such as the EA Ultimate Hockey League 24/7, which allows you to play other user created teams offline.

On the ice, at first it’s tough to spot anything different from last year, but after a couple of games the changes begin to take shape. Most noticeably the defensive AI is significantly improved and playing the game on some of the lower settings can be a challenge and when you up the level and change the game type to hardcore, you’re in for a real test from the CPU.

EA is touting a new “anticipation” AI, which helps defenders play the lanes better and the new “battling in front of the net” feature which is also clearly in play – but the key is that the AI plays better positional hockey than before and that alone is a big deal. (Although I’d like to see the AI occasionally ice the puck or go offsides and you will need to adjust the penalty settings to get more play stoppages).