The franchise mode annoyances would most likely drag the overall evaluation down quite a bit if not for my favorite new mode: the Ultimate Hockey League. NHL 11 is not the first game to support this whole “trading card” thing; in fact Madden does this and to be perfectly blunt I have always found Madden’s Ultimate Team mode a waste of time. It’s just not my thing. NHL’s Ultimate Hockey Team is ridiculously addictive, however, mainly due to hockey’s global format over the NFL.

Beginning with a starter pack of cards you can immediately hit the ice and play against other minor league teams either solo vs. the AI, online or via tournaments. (The game is always connected to the EA servers.) Each game earns you “EA Pucks” which can then be spent to buy new packs of various qualities. Players have contracts, training slots (which are filled with certain training cards to improve skills), chemistry factors, stats, salaries (and there is a cap that you have to adhere to) and the “schedule” runs for each calendar month. You can play as often as you like.

It’s a real shock to the system that I enjoy this mode as much as I do, and it’s hard to fully test it as this review was written before the game went officially “live” but I have managed to play over a dozen Ultimate Hockey Games both solo and local co-op with a hockey nut buddy of mine and I cannot get enough of it. It’s really one big online Dynasty Mode as players actually “age” in that old players have “X” number of games in them before they quit so you can’t hoard old veterans forever. I cannot stress how addictive this mode of play is and I suspect it will be a real driving force behind NHL’s success. My only complaint is that you can boost your team by spending real money to buy better packs, so it's not all based on time spent earning your spot but rather you can spend a few bucks to get better players.

The hockey purist can certainly find things wrong with NHL 11. Defense can be a bit lax at times, the speed issue is always a sticking point with the old guard, and there is no question that franchise mode, as robust as it is, needs a statistical kick in the pants. None of this changes the fact that NHL 11 plays a remarkable brand of hockey. This is the best hockey game ever made, and is a real feather in the cap for EA Sports in a year where the company literally doesn’t have any competition on the Xbox 360 or PS3. EA Sports could have taken a year off and released a ho-hum effort, but instead we get this juggernaut of a game that you simply should not miss.