NHL 2K10 is not a game that tries to perfectly capture the experience of playing hockey. It is in act a game that works very hard to capture the experience of playing hockey and watching hockey on TV. Then it attempts to take those two experiences and meld them seamlessly together.
The problem is, there are quite a lot of seams, and what the game gains in attempting this melding act is not worth the effort.
Hockey is an exciting and peculiar sport, especially when compared to all of the other sports available in 2K’s bullpen. Full of long stretches of back-and-forth play without goal, sudden flurries of violence, and tense scores and near misses, hockey has always been right for video game translation.
As it stands now, 2K10’s Hockey is both exciting and frustrating, and you can’t help but think of the game that could have been.
At the core of the game is the actually playing of hockey, but this is divided between two kinds of play: multiplayer and single player. Here, you will play defense and offense against computer and human enemies, the latter being far more devilishly difficult opponents.
You can’t talk about the experience of NHL 2K10 without talking about its presentation and staggering flexibility. This is the kind of game that, right off the bat, lets you fiddle with every single aspect of every part of the game. From rosters to character creation to franchise modes, you can adjust anything along a scale from one to one hundred.
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