The introductory movie featuring hockey superstar Alexander Ovechkin narrating his own rise from a promising hockey phenom to finally winning the Stanley Cup was a masterful stroke of editing that pumped me up for what was to come - and I’m not even a Washington Capitals fan. When it comes to presentation, NHL 21 makes a good first impression. So how does NHL 21 perform when it comes to these other aspects of gaming? Presentation and visuals After all, the last thing you want in an annual sports game release is a glorified roster change. This is especially true when you’re asking consumers to fork out $60 for another iteration of a game that they’ve bought year after year. How does it look? Does it play well? What features does it offer? When it comes down to it, a game should still be able to stand on its own merits. As such, not having abusive microtransaction practices should honestly be the bare minimum for garnering goodwill from players. For that alone, NHL 21 deserves praise.Īll that being said, I happen to be an old-school gamer who still remembers when hidden or extra features in a game were earned through gameplay and not bought. Personally, I’ve never felt the need to pay for stuff in order to fully experience what the game has to offer. Despite having microtransactions, it’s entirely possible to enjoy the bulk of the game’s modes without being slapped in the face with the need to indulge in them. To its credit, however, microtransactions in NHL 21 still remain tame, at least when compared to some of the worst offenders out there. Nevertheless, I was worried that perhaps NHL 21 would be the title where the franchise would finally up the ante on microtransactions like its other sports brethren. One is Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer series. There are a few games, however, where the practice isn’t as blatant and you can still enjoy the game without spending a dime. The practice is pretty much now embedded in the major sports titles that come out. When it comes to sports games today, one thing that needs to be talked about right off the bat is the big elephant in the room: microtransactions. One of those would be EA’s annual escapade on ice, the NHL video game series. That being said, my adventures with the Kansas City Chiefs and its gunslinging quarterback Pat Mahomes - and my review of that game - is still in progress as I go through my backlog of titles to check out.Īll that being said, there have been a couple of exceptions in recent years when it came to my sports game apathy. This year will also be the first time I’m wading back into Madden once again, largely because my favorite team finally won the Super Bowl during my lifetime. “Look at what they did to my boy,” I remember thinking. (Just recently, NBA 2K21 also started adding unskippable ads during loading screens after reviews were already over.) That is, until it turned into the spring break version of a microtransaction bacchanal. I remember absolutely loving that video game franchise at one point, which I considered to be the best sports game bar none thanks to its mix of gameplay, features and tack-sharp visuals. Regardless of the reasons, I just stopped.Įven as someone who reviews video games as part of my job, I can’t even remember the last time I requested a review copy of, say, an NBA 2K game. In other cases, I found myself just completely turned off by the blatant use of microtransactions. I thought maybe it would be better to skip the next couple of games, at least until they kill the servers for the game I had. One reason was that I started noticing that there really wasn’t much of a change between many of the brand new games and the titles they were replacing. Looking back, it’s really no surprise why my love affair with sports games ended with the whimper of an errant airball. Then I’d suddenly be reminded of the games gathering dust on the shelf once the next iteration of the franchise comes along. There were even a few years when I’d still buy the games out of habit, even though I wasn’t really playing them as much as I used to. It wasn’t a sudden change, mind you, especially for myself. Somewhere along the way, though, we just stopped. That’s how much we both enjoyed playing sports games. By the time the rivalry between EA Sports and Visual Concepts came about, there were times when we would actually buy their competing games during the same year. I say that as someone who used to religiously buy sports games starting way back in the NES days so my brother and I can play them to death, at least until the next new shiny sports title comes along.
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