Almost perfect.
(Author's Note: This review was originally written shortly after the game's release; certain topical references have been left for the sake of simplicity.)
After delivering a powerful performance with last year's ESPN NHL Hockey, developer Kush Games has scored another victory in the name of good hockey gaming, making exactly the kind of upgrades you would expect from an annual sports title, rather than simply delivering the glorified roster update many expected at the US$20 price point. In fact, only a couple of annoying, though hardly crippling, bugs keep ESPN NHL 2K5 from reaching its full potential.
Many of the changes to this year's edition come in the Franchise mode. This year, you can hire a full coaching staff, including a scout, and their attributes will affect your team's performance--a poor coach will directly affect how your players play, particularly in simulation. The ridiculous point system has been removed in favour of real dollar values, which instantly lends a far-greater credibility to the contract negotiations, which this year include a wide range of incentives and signing bonuses. The greatest contribution, though, comes in the minor league system. This year, instead of just having the minors be a repository for young players that you don't want "scratched", it's are a full-blown league of its own, which runs simultaneously to your NHL campaign. Sending down or calling up players will directly affect your minor league team, and best of all, the scouting system looks at their progress and their attributes and makes a rough call of what role they will play. Of course, a better scout will give you more accurate results, but the information provided could be enough to decide whether to sign a prospect to an NHL contract or to let them develop further. The off-season has also been revamped, allowing you to scout players in detail in various locales throughout the world and even play practice games with them to help gauge their talents leading up to the draft. The whole system is much better implemented and feels much more real, and is probably the greatest improvement to the game as a whole.
Not to be outdone are the new game modes added this year. The most prominent of these is the Party Mode, featuring fifteen hockey-related minigames that test a variety of skills. For people who don't really play hockey, it's not a bad way to introduce them to some of the concepts, although it's not likely to win over many new fans. Another feature is the Dream Team ladder, in which you play essentially stacked teams selected by various ESPN personalities and NHL players, with the ultimate objective of beating all 20 and being able to create your own. In practice, it's not as interesting as it first sounds, since many of the teams are fairly repetitive, but it's certainly an idea with merit. Finally, you can unlock and play the Heritage Classic, the first outdoor game in NHL history, played between the Montreal Canadiens and the host Edmonton Oilers in Commonwealth Stadium November 22, 2003. It doesn't play any differently than a regular hockey game, but it looks great, and is a nice nod to diehard fans.
And speaking of unlockables, all your favourites are back from last year's game, along with many others. There are new historical jerseys to add to last year's compliment, and game modes including No Helmet, Big Head, and Pond Hockey are all here as well. All of last year's teams come pre-unlocked, and you can unlock about two dozen more, including three of the final four teams from the 1993 playoffs (Montreal, Los Angeles, and Toronto). New this year are All-Time Teams, featuring the greatest stars of the Original Six teams--Montreal, Toronto, Boston, Chicago, New York, and Detroit--and themed rinks (only a couple of which will appeal to hockey purists). To go with this are numerous new challenges, and unlike last year, you can unlock challenges in any order you please, which makes it much easier to gain the points necessary to unlock the really nice stuff.
None of this would matter if the on-ice product wasn't up to snuff, and thankfully, it's a dramatic improvement over last year's already-great action. For starters, goalie passing, formerly an exercise in excruciating pain, has been brought up to the level of skater passing, making defence much better to play. This year, backward skating and stick-sweeping (for blocking passing/shooting lanes) have both been made functions of the left trigger and the left and right thumbsticks, respectively, which makes dealing with odd-man rushes a lot better. The one-timer has been neutered somewhat, but in a good way: now, it finally occupies approximately the position it does in real hockey, a quick offensive shot that sometimes goes in, but more often than not, simply sets up rebound opportunities. The Intense Contact Controls also make hitting a lot easier. Finally, hooking has been moved off the X button (which is now solely the domain of shooting), and added to the right thumbstick, along with a host of other grey-area and outright illegal maneuvers (which are accessible by clicking then moving the right thumbstick) in something akin to the "hit stick" in Madden NFL 2005. For stopping an offensive player, it's unquestionably more effective than a simple bodycheck or pokecheck, but the obvious downside is the risk of a penalty. With all these defensive improvements, you'd think it'd be almost impossible to score, but fortunately, the goalies aren't brick walls like they were before, so it becomes fairly even.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of rather glaring problems with this game that another week in QA would surely have fixed. When using custom soundtracks, an Xbox-exclusive feature which allows you to use music from your hard drive to recreate the authentic atmostphere of any or all arenas, the arena buzzer mysteriously resets to 0, and can't be returned to its proper value. Also, when AI players suffer injuries in Franchise (and presumably Season) mode, the game will sometimes freeze during simulation because it neglected to call up/trade for/activate players and fill out the roster. This is fixable by finding the team in question, then backing out of the Edit Lines area, at which point it will prompt you to auto-fill the lines. It's a minor annoyance, but it certainly speaks to the need to save often.
However, these bugs are both avoidable, and are the only real blemishes on what is otherwise the best hockey video game created to date. Whatever the future of Sega's 2K series, in the wake of EA's recent maneuvering, hockey fans should hope that the NHL games continue, because they are the best thing around during the lockout, and arguably more entertaining than the real deal would have been anyway.
