Moving on to the gameplay modes, there aren’t many left. Gone are Season, Tournament, Battle for the Cup, and Playoff modes. Sure, they were simply shortcuts to get to some exciting parts of an NHL season experience, but the variety was none the less appreciated. The NHL 94 and Winter Classic modes are missing as well, though not that many folks played them. NHL 16 Moments Live does remain available, so there's some fun to be had recreating various scenarios that mirror events of the real sports. If you find the tutorial icons distracting, you can turn them off completely. After being traded a player's morale isn't automatically fixed, but it can go back up. Some players will adjust faster than others. Background ratings determine loyalty (free agency discount), adapter (morale resets quickly)

 

At the end of this review you’re going to see that CGM has given NHL 16 the score of 6/10. It’s a score that I award to the entire team, and it is easy to forget that these development teams include HR personnel, studio managers, accountants, marketing staff members, and the business men who hold the budgetary purse strings. While I found the core game-play mechanics of this year’s addition are the same or better than last year’s NHL 16, the game feels stripped down in terms of content. NHL 16 Moments Live is basically what you would expect, by offering the best moments from the real life hockey season. It features a number of key situations from last season, but the mode will be even better once the moments from the 2014-2015 season start to be added. This is one of the modes that could easily keep bringing people back to experience the biggest moments of the upcoming season after that happen.

 

This also makes be sad that they have removed the NHL 94 mode out of the PS4 and XBOX One games. I know it is nostalgia, but I grew up playing that game. It will always have a place in my heart. Don’t be too disheartened, though, as I have heard that some of the removed stuff will be put back in with future patches. The jerseys in this game seem to be made out of silk. They flex and ripple way too much. Jersey material is more rigid. It kind of throws the realism off a bit once you notice that the jerseys don’t move quite right. But it is a welcome change from the rigid models of the games before it.

 

The game on ice is pretty good and largely unchanged from last year. I have concerns with the game difficulty though. The CPU is a little too good at everything, this is the first year where I had to mess around with the gameplay sliders (which changes how the game plays and how good the CPU is). I had difficulty finding a sweet spot. I’ve always thought that EA should offer a percentage difficulty option instead of locking you into 5 different difficulty options. Not everyone is at the same level, and if your skill level doesn’t fall exactly into one of those 5 difficulty levels the game either becomes too frustrating or too easy depending on which difficulty level you try.

 

Back to the “live” intros for the important games. I’m not sure how many of these they shot, but in all the games I’ve played where these come up at the beginning, I’ve only seen maybe four or five variations repeated over and over which quickly takes the magic out of it. The other various sounds of the arena, skates on the ice, sticks on pucks, bodies colliding, the arena announcer and the roar of the crowd all sound great which just tends to shine a bigger spotlight on the flaws in the game. The menu system is revamped and is now closer to the one you see in FIFA 14. Gone are the absurdly organized options of previous years. In NHL 16 for example, the branching menu system had its options placed in non-sensical orders.

 

You’d choose Be a GM and the first option would be New and then Load, despite the fact that you load a save file 99% of the time. NHL 16 fixes this with large panels instead of lists. I understand the need to occasionally start over with a franchise. Rebuilding a franchise on a new engine certainly offers new opportunities, but at the same time it's a challenge to then create a refined experience when the development team is not as familiar with the engine, and EA Sports has had that problem in the past. The first version of Madden that came out with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 was a joke years ago, and in fact some of the modes that were present in the PlayStation 2 version only found their way onto the PlayStation 3 Madden games recently (such as the owner mode) or still haven't been added back in (play editor/ creator). However the PlayStation 4 take on both FIFA and Madden was strong enough from the outset, and I had hoped NHL would be as fortunate.