I recently sat down with NHL’s creative director William Ho, and played a solid 45 minutes of the new NHL 20. For the most part, the game looks beautiful. When a company says they’ve “listened to the fans” I always take it with many a grain of salt. However, I noticed immediately that some of the biggest issues in the previous installments were either barely noticeable or eliminated entirely. The gameplay is oh so smooth. When a player fires a hard pass up the line, the recipient will no longer glide awkwardly up until contact with the puck. In NHL 20, the players predict the path and effortlessly merge with the motion of the puck. No longer will a well timed pass create a speed disadvantage against your opponents. Similarly, chasing a puck into the boards will no longer consistently leave you open for a massive hit or tie up. Your player will now gracefully scoop up the puck and maintain speed and direction providing significantly more scoring opportunities and play making. To accommodate all the additional scoring opportunities that such fluid gameplay creates, EA has considerably amped up the goalies AI, including what they call a “full offensive threat analysis”, which allows goalies to read the positions of attackers and plan their rebounds accordingly. Your goalie now has a better chance of sending a hard obvious shot back to one of your players instead of literally handing it to an enemy. Lastly, the commentators in NHL 19 were so poor at reading the play that they were more of a distraction than help. Now, with countless hours of pre-programmed banter, James Cybulski and Ray Ferraro can and will add a significant realism to your game. It looks fantastic, and the controls are so fluid and dynamic that it truly takes you one step closer to actually being on the ice. Few of us purchase a new NHL game every single year, so i’ll make a suggestion. Grab yourself a copy, and put your skates to the ice. You won’t regret it.