After playing five games of NHL 2K8 you may want to consider throwing the game out the window and into oncoming traffic. After ten games things start to feel a little bit better and by the twentieth game the new controls start to become second nature and you are rewarded with a deep, satisfying, if still fundamentally flawed hockey game.

The buzzword with this year’s edition is “new control scheme” and it truly is a love or hate sort of thing. There is very little middle ground with it. There is no denying that it’s a bit cumbersome and not as intuitive as it should be. The new “Pro Stick” isn’t the problem; this is simply a 360 degree full motion stick handling feature using the right stick. You can’t shoot with it, but you can freely control the puck and it’s a fantastic way to get into the exact position you need before shooting the puck. Here’s the kicker, though: not every player can use it to its fullest extent because, well, not every NHL player is created equal.

Playing as the Jackets and controlling Zherdev and Pro Sticking down the ice is a totally different experience than if you are controlling Jody Shelley. Zherdev quickly moves the puck from right to left and behind his skates, making it dance—and Shelley is lucky to control the puck at all. These player differences are crucial in order to get the most out of Pro Stick—you simply cannot ask players to do things that they are incapable of doing.

The frustration with the controls is that it just feels different. After years of playing the game a certain way to totally throw a new scheme in your face takes some getting used to – shooting a wrister with the right bumper, pulling the left trigger to wind up a slap shot (while still using the bumper to shoot) and passing with the left bumper feels downright weird at first. This is certainly different and not as user friendly as it should be, but it’s nothing that should force you to quit playing. The game comes with a nice set of basic tutorials that teach you every move that you need in order to play and you can practice these for as long as you like in order to get comfortable with it.

The problem with NHL 2K8 isn’t so much the new controls but instead in how the AI plays. This is certainly a competitive game, and you shouldn’t dominate against the AI but the game feels stale in certain areas. Powerplay AI is very weak and you never truly feel on the defensive when trying to kill a penalty. Of course NHL 2K isn’t alone in this, as this has never been simulated well in hockey video games, but it’s not much better here.

Offensive AI is mostly broken down into two on two rushes rather than playing sound positional hockey. That’s not to say that the AI doesn’t try to pass the puck and work for a shot but it usually doesn’t need to. It looks to breakout at every turn and will be happy to race down the ice and fire off a wrister—and because it’s so easy to disrupt the AI when it does try to run a set, this is probably as good as strategy as any.

It’s easy to disrupt things because hitting is way too prominent this year; even setting the hitting “slider” to zero doesn’t change the fact that you are likely to see upwards to 40 hits per team in a 10-minute period game. And it doesn’t matter who is doing the checking, either – everyone can lay people out this year. The best defense in NHL 2K8 is to blast someone of his feet. The AI knows this too and it plays an overly aggressive game—tagging a skater as he winds up for a slap shot from the point. It works yeah, but it looks weird to see a defender rush up and shoulder charge a player in mid-shot every time he starts to wind up.

So sure, hitting is kind of silly, and the controls are a bit on the awkward side and the offensive AI could use a boost, but despite all of that the game succeeds because of its shocking level of variety. No two games feel the same, not so much because of play styles but rather because of morale, fatigue, player ratings, and goal scoring. No longer is the game dominated by one-timers. Goals come in all shapes and colors from blasts from the blue line to rebounds, to shots that clang off the post.