Nintendo Entertainment System
Released in 1988 by Nintendo
Grade: C+
Ice Hockey is limited but playable and charming, beating out the other popular hockey game on NES, Blades of Steel.
Where it falls in the series
Let’s call this a one-off release. The only other hockey game published by Nintendo is the headache-inducing NHL Stanley Cup on SNES.
Praises and gripes
You’ve got just four skaters plus a goalie in this game, helping to make the bright white ice feel pleasantly wide open. You need to construct your squad before each game, choosing from any combination of the skinny fast guy, the medium medium guy, and the big slow guy. Before you even drop the puck, this piece of team management gives the action some variance and gives teams an identity. You’re also given five options for the game’s speed.
The action is fairly smooth but it can get chaotic as the players bounce off each other, and sometimes it’s a pain to switch players in the heat of the moment. When you’re able to skate in open space, it feels close to hockey’s slipping and sliding feel, and I like how players can exploit the roomy behind-the-net area. All the players follow the action from end to end and try to contribute on both offense and defense, which is fun and realistic compared to the more positional framework in Blades of Steel.
The game’s achilles heel is the fact that you need to manually control your goalie while also controlling defenders. Those moments when the opponent crashes the net can be awfully difficult to manage. Do you focus on keeping your goalie in position or do you try to steal the puck and get it out of there?
The fighting is limited to cartoonish skirmishes, which are triggered anytime defenders repeatedly blast the puck-carrier during a scrum for the puck. There are other light-hearted touches, like players sliding on their butts, zambonis cleaning the ice between periods, and upbeat music that’s actually pretty good.
Charming as it is, there isn’t anything about Ice Hockey that makes me want to hunker down and play more than one game at a time. The fun of skating around, generating offense, and plowing dudes over doesn’t outweigh its simplistic gameplay and occasional frustrations.
Teams
In a wise design move, Ice Hockey uses basic single-color team uniforms.
- USA – blue
- Sweden – yellow
- Poland – dark green
- Canada – light green
- USSR – red
- Czechoslovakia – gray
Published November 8, 2025