NHL 2K7
Kush Games pairs the SIXAXIS with next-gen visuals and ends up with a killer game of hockey.
Published: November 30, 2006
Short of, say, an arcade basketball game, few sports have made the leap from real to digital recreations as wholly intact and intuitively as hockey. Maybe it's because the game itself isn't terribly hard to understand. Take seven guys, throw skates on them and have them push a little rubber disc with a stick past a huge dude guarding a sizeable goal. Most anyone can understand that, and the only real challenge then becomes replicating some of the nuances of the sport as video games slowly march ever-closer to being a convincing replication of a broadcast sports event.
And for the past couple years now, 2K Sports (or, more appropriately, their Kush Games studio) has been making the best hockey games available. Now granted, if you've been an Xbox gamer, they're the only hockey games available, but Sony is still pumping out their Gretzky games to PlayStation owners. With Gretzky on the backburner and EA choosing their next-gen battles, the door has been left wide open for 2K to have the only hockey game on the PlayStation 3.
Don't make the mistake of thinking this means it's a stripped-down offering thanks to a lack of competition; 2K happily embraced the SIXAXIS and included PS3-exclusive modes, kicked out a truly next-gen offering thanks to presentation and visual upgrades, and continued to refine and hone the fluid animation system and quick play style of the series. It's not perfect, but it is a solid way to spend your money.
Cinemotion is something 2K Sports has been pimping for a while now (along with their deal to include Sub Pop artists on the soundtrack, which seems like an odd mix, but hey, I'll take a little Postal Service with my hockey, sure), but the execution is actually fairly cool. You have the option of flicking on commentary or music, and the game effectively cuts a real-time movie, slowly layering in music (or chatter from Harry Neale and Bob Cole if you went for that) and painting things with a cinematic brush. In effect, you're getting "cutscenes" while playing through the game (though not while you're playing the game). The idea -- and it works to a large degree -- is that you basically have an orchestral soundtrack that ebbs and flows with the tide of the game, building to a climax when big game moments crop up.
Though most complained about the 360 getting a more or less higher-res version of the PS2 game that was released last year when the console was released, 2K7 is undoubtedly a next-gen offering. The animation is fantastic, the sense of weight and physics are there, and the improvements to the formula, while minimal (all the stuff from previous games like on-the-fly play calling, crease control and icon passing are here), help add to an already solid package.
Drop passes are now a button press away, and pressure control now lets you use multiple taps (once to shadow a target, twice to get aggressive, a handful of taps for double coverage and holding it issues a mean check) to simply and easily bust up the defense a little. The franchise mode has been thickened a little with some basic salary caps, a more intense rivalry system that tracks how you play against certain teams and actually adjusts team stats to reflect peaks and valleys in the matchups, and the same solid scouting and free agent recruiting tools are in place.
And for the past couple years now, 2K Sports (or, more appropriately, their Kush Games studio) has been making the best hockey games available. Now granted, if you've been an Xbox gamer, they're the only hockey games available, but Sony is still pumping out their Gretzky games to PlayStation owners. With Gretzky on the backburner and EA choosing their next-gen battles, the door has been left wide open for 2K to have the only hockey game on the PlayStation 3.
Don't make the mistake of thinking this means it's a stripped-down offering thanks to a lack of competition; 2K happily embraced the SIXAXIS and included PS3-exclusive modes, kicked out a truly next-gen offering thanks to presentation and visual upgrades, and continued to refine and hone the fluid animation system and quick play style of the series. It's not perfect, but it is a solid way to spend your money.
Cinemotion is something 2K Sports has been pimping for a while now (along with their deal to include Sub Pop artists on the soundtrack, which seems like an odd mix, but hey, I'll take a little Postal Service with my hockey, sure), but the execution is actually fairly cool. You have the option of flicking on commentary or music, and the game effectively cuts a real-time movie, slowly layering in music (or chatter from Harry Neale and Bob Cole if you went for that) and painting things with a cinematic brush. In effect, you're getting "cutscenes" while playing through the game (though not while you're playing the game). The idea -- and it works to a large degree -- is that you basically have an orchestral soundtrack that ebbs and flows with the tide of the game, building to a climax when big game moments crop up.
Though most complained about the 360 getting a more or less higher-res version of the PS2 game that was released last year when the console was released, 2K7 is undoubtedly a next-gen offering. The animation is fantastic, the sense of weight and physics are there, and the improvements to the formula, while minimal (all the stuff from previous games like on-the-fly play calling, crease control and icon passing are here), help add to an already solid package.
Drop passes are now a button press away, and pressure control now lets you use multiple taps (once to shadow a target, twice to get aggressive, a handful of taps for double coverage and holding it issues a mean check) to simply and easily bust up the defense a little. The franchise mode has been thickened a little with some basic salary caps, a more intense rivalry system that tracks how you play against certain teams and actually adjusts team stats to reflect peaks and valleys in the matchups, and the same solid scouting and free agent recruiting tools are in place.
