PlanetDreamcast | Games | Reviews | NHL 2K2

NHL 2K2 Sega Sports brings you the last US Dreamcast game. - Review By Alex Tsotsos - Page 2/2 Gameplay And Control All in all, the game plays a lot more like real hockey than any other game I've seen. Checks that bring a player to his knees are more the exception than the rule. Collision detection is excellent, and really shows on fights against the boards. Though the movement of the players is a lot more realistic, the game is still very fast and favors sweeping attacks rather than the slow chess game that develops in power plays. Sometimes three or four players will crowd the puck and it's very difficult to tell when you've got it. This leads to instances when you check someone when you want to pass and vice-versa. A slider allows you to set how strict the referees will be when calling penalties. Unlike NHL2K, penalties are now in proportion to the period length. If you've got the game set up for five minute periods, a major penalty will take a minute and 15 seconds, not the entire period. There are two different control schemes, basic and advanced, and there's no way to alter the button layout. Player movement is handled with the analog stick, and the D-pad handles both line changes and coaching strategies (both of which can be set to off, auto, or manual in options.) Line changes are inelegant at best. Instead of bringing up a pop-up menu to choose the line, it cycles through the various lines. This is slow, ineffective, and requires you to relinquish control of the puck handler (if you didn't dump beforehand) while you choose the line. Advanced controls allow you to separate the turbo button from the body check button and make the shoulder triggers "modify" buttons. This essentially doubles the moves available to you. Passing to other players is intuitive. Shooting the puck is a touch-and-go affair. Simply holding the shot button down for an extra amount of time doesn't seem to give you a harder shot. Aiming your shot also isn't easy. Presentation And Sound If there's one area where NHL2K2 suffers, it's in presentation. This is utterly no frills hockey. There is one animation for goal celebration. When the game is over, the teams go back to their benches and sit down. The anthems are very quiet, and no one applauds. The crowds sound more like a bunch of people in a room than an arena full of fans. It's not all bad, however. Visual Concepts arranged for the rights to at least one sports anthem to be played during their impressive opening ceremony. The two-man booth featuring Alex Green and Bob Miller is very good, and lacks the nutty color commentary of EA's NHL series. They bring a good amount of background information about the teams and players. However, there is one line of script where the play-by-play announcer says "X brings the puck out of the endzone..." Endzone? I have never heard of the defensive zone referred to as the endzone, and I asked all my hardcore hockey fan friends and they've never heard of it either. The sounds from the ice could have used a little more work as well. Hard checks sound like light checks, and those sound like mere shrugs than powerful body slams. There are no stick sounds, and some sort of audio cue signifying the end of a power play would have been appreciated. The menus for the game are laid out in the Visual Concepts radial menu style. A cursor at the center of the screen can be controlled with the analog pad, but this method is extremely clumsy and you're better off using the d-pad. As for what's available in the menus, it's everything you expect to see in a console hockey game, including full fantasy drafts and player creation. There are no surprises, and that's a running theme throughout the entire game. The Dreamcast was a great system, and Sega hockey was once a force to be reckoned with. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the Dreamcast has ended with a whimper called NHL2K2. It has never measured up to the other Visual Concepts games. While it has all the makings of a great game, its ho-hum presentation, standard graphics and gameplay, missing online play and overall lack of innovation make this a game to pass on if you can. The Final Word If you Dreamcast owners haven't gone on to other systems, by all means, get this game. It's the feel good hit of the year. Developer: Visual Concepts Publisher: Sega Genre: Sports Highs: Standard menus, it's easy to get around in the game, fairly realistic hockey, decent play-by-play. Graphics are decent, no slowdown, no online play. Lows: Pure and simple lack of innovation, bland presentation, nothing inspires any sort of excitement, line change method is clumsy. Delays in audience reaction and announcing, stats seem to be meaningless. Other: 1-4 players, VMU compatible, Standard controller. Final Score: (out of a possible 10) Previous Reviews Comments on this review? Mail Feedback or talk about it with others in the Forums.