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The hopes of a franchise and its fans rest on your shoulders as you skate onto the ice to a deafening roar from towel-waving fans in an arena alive with the dreams of thousands. Here’s your chance to prove you are tough enough to battle the most skilled and determined athletes in the world in pursuit of the ultimate prize — the Stanley Cup Championship. Prove your resolve, inspire your teammates and write your own history with NHL 10 from EA SPORTS.

NHL 10 features more than 200 gameplay refinements that replicate the skill and finesse of hockey, spectacular new ways to score, and improved goaltender intelligence. Winning one-on-one battles for possession of the puck along the boards is now a test of will and skill. Utilizing an all-new board physics engine, players can use their body to shield the puck on the boards and kick-pass it to teammates. Watch bigger, stronger players pin opponents to the boards while fanatical fans bang the glass, just like real life. Grab and tug an opponent’s jersey to land the punch that ignites the fans and sparks your team to victory. Prove you are tough enough to quiet the crowd, silence the opposition and survive a playoff run to lift the Stanley Cup!

Genre: Sports

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: EA Canada

Online Play: 12 Versus

Local Play: 4 Versus

September 14, 2009 –
When making a sports game, or any game for that matter, developers are trying to build the best experience possible. And while winning prestigious game of the year awards is all anyone can hope for their creation, the bar is then set almost impossibly high for the next iteration in the series.

Such is the case with NHL 10, a title that must live up to the twelve sports game of the year awards that NHL 09 garnered. While I won’t say that NHL 10 is a step in the wrong direction for the series, it doesn’t bring as much innovation as last year’s hockey offering from EA Sports and will likely be met with malice from naysayers because of that fact. That withstanding, NHL 10 is still a worthy successor and one that makes slight changes and additions to the established formula.

Click above to watch Nate Dog lose a fight in NHL 10.


The core gameplay and game modes have remained largely unchanged, which is a good thing as anyone who played last year’s game knows. When you first step onto the ice in an exhibition game you’ll swear you’re playing NHL 09, but that will quickly change as you spend more time with it. For starters, you have the new ability of board play (i.e. sandwiching another player into the board and grappling for the puck) that helps bring the look of the on-screen action closer to reality. There were times when I felt as though my player was being sucked into the board play and it wasn’t happening all that naturally, while other instances made total sense and flowed well with the rest of the game. As I got better at the game I was able to steer clear of unnecessary board play by angling my skating away from the outer edges of the rink, so that helped lessen the feeling of being sucked in by the mechanic.

Fighting has also been revamped into a first-person melee with another skater. Since I first saw this mechanic back at E3 I haven’t been much of a fan. Fighting from a first-person vantage point in a hockey game simply feels unnatural and the experience, though improved from what I originally saw, is still too forced. Punches don’t have much of an impact and the fact that there’s no bruising and bloodying (knocking helmets off is as close as you’ll come) because of NHL restrictions is a real bummer.

Other changes on the ice are more finite but not all are for the betterment of the gameplay. This year players have the ability to hit pucks out of the air for highlight-reel goals. They’re tough to score, but when you do it’ll be a video you’ll want to save and upload to EA Sports World. Post-whistle play allows for players to jaw and check each other for a few seconds after the whistle blows (this is how most of your fights will start). The AI (artificial intelligence) does a good job of sticking up for their teammates, but if you skate around and ruffle feathers for just a few seconds everything on the screen degrades to a free-for-all. What you get isn’t so much aggressive hockey as it is a street brawl on ice. Occasionally there will be roughing penalties handed out, but more often than not the refs turn a blind eye to your shenanigans.

Click above to watch action from the EA Sports Hockey League.


Probably the biggest change to the gameplay is the addition of preset game styles. While it’s true that the new styles don’t inherently change the way you play NHL, they do change the type of hockey that you’ll be playing in order to suit your tastes. There’s casual, default, normal and hardcore styles. They change the hits you’ll see, they change the speed of the game significantly, they change passing accuracy and how often penalties will be called. You can go beyond the preset styles and create your own through the use of sliders, but what’s already on the disc provides for a good starting point to craft your own brand of hockey.

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