I hope you like tapping the circle button.
PlayStation 2
Released in 2001 by EA Sports
Grade: D
This is a decent effort with some solid ingredients, but it’s spoiled by jumpy animations, bad physics, and annoying control quirks.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the second EA NHL game in the PS2/Xbox generation. 2001, 2002, and 2003 all earned good reviews at the time, but don’t hold up well today. The highly revamped NHL 2004 stands out from the PS2 pack and makes the earlier versions pretty non-essential additions to a collection.
Praises and gripes
With solid AI, this is a decent depiction of competitive, high-intensity hockey with a touch of arcade-style simplicity, but horribly herky-jerk motions.
Players violently jump from animation to animation, which looks bad and is a headache to control. For example, when players receive a pass, they don’t glide forward and collect the puck in stride — they’re stutter-stepping and jolting around, snapping from a “skating” animation to a “skating with the puck” animation.
There’s a jerkiness even when you’re just skating with the puck and trying to maneuver around defenders, as if they took Marshall Faulk out of Madden and hid him inside a hockey uniform. A far cry from the sweet smoothness of EA’s classic Genesis titles.
To make matters worse, there’s a speed burst button that is most effective when tapped constantly. It’s not really a speed “burst,” it’s more of a speed pop. Two problems there: 1) The end result doesn’t look much like skating. 2) It’s annoying as hell to keep tapping the button for an entire game. Who thought that was a good idea? Put all this together, it’s just messy. It feels like a chore to play.
Visually, it’s understandable that there were years like this. This game is from a time when developers were drastically improving the look of individual sporting motions, but stitching them together organically was still a challenge to be conquered.
NHL 2002 represents a necessary step in the series’ evolution. In a vacuum, though, it’s a shame that the final product didn’t come out better.