NHL Hitz Pro
Score: 85% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Midway Developer: Next Level Games Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 - 8 Genre: Sports (Hockey)/ Action
Graphics & Sound: Being born and raised in the Deep South, I know about as much about hockey as I do driving in the snow. One of the great things about NHL Hitz Pro is that none of that matters. Based off the NFL Blitz series, Hitz focuses more on an 'arcade' style hockey game than one based strictly on actual hockey rules. Whelp, as usual let's start things off by talking about the pretty colors on the screen. I rarely find a sports game with graphics that dazzle or 'Wow' me. At this point they've pretty much reached the threshold on realism in sports games for the PS2. So as long as I don't find anything to complain about, we're in business. Lucky for Midway, I didn't. Everything looks just peachy on the graphics front. The colors look pretty, the animations are smooth, and the crowd looks, well, the crowd just looks really cool. The music is incredible. No, really, it blows my mind. How did they ever come up with such magnificent orchestration? I guess the sarcasm is kinda obvious, huh? Well yeah, this is a sports game, so aside from some popular music playing during menus and such, there's no music to be found. The sound effects are pretty standard stuff that you'd hear during a hockey game - whistles, skates, pads, fights, glass shattering, people igniting in flames... you know, hockey stuff.
Gameplay: Well, basically this is hockey. You use these big sticks to put a little round puck into a netted goal. But then there's all the hitting, which just makes everything so much more fun. NHL Hitz Pro strips away all the little unimportant rules (like blue lines and such) and just leaves the game's core. You smack other guys around to take the puck from them. Then you get the puck to their end and put it in the goal. They did keep a few of the rules, like icing and the like. You can also turn on all of the actual hockey rules, but the engine was really designed for the arcade style, so it's not nearly as much fun. Like any fun arcade style sports game, they also included a few fantastical elements to make things more interesting. For example, whenever you win a fight, you'll become 'on fire' and be able to wreak havoc on the ice. Speaking of fighting, it's a little lame. You basically watch the computer randomly pick a button, then you and your opponent have to hit that button as fast as you can. I would have preferred some actual real-time fisticuffs, but that's just me. Oh yes, I also have to mention the tutorial. While I think it was a tad lacking, what was there was awesome. After the game teaches you about a certain aspect of the game, you get to watch a video clip of an actual pro talking about how that aspect works in real-life hockey, and then again about how it works in the game. That's just cool.
Difficulty: There's really only one word to describe the difficulty in most modern sports games, scalable. With all the little things you can tweak like stats and handicaps, anyone can find a difficulty setting that's perfect for them. As someone who knows nothing about hockey, I was able to beat the snot out of the computer with everything on default. So anyone can probably manage.
Game Mechanics: Like any good sports game nowadays, NHL Hitz Pro sports a couple of different play modes. You've got Exhibition, Season, Playoffs, and even a Franchise mode, which let's you take a preset team and try to win enough games to join the NHL. The game also sports a huge assortment of options to hand tailor your hockey experience. It's not as simple as picking an 'arcade style' or 'real-life style' hockey game. You can hand pick each rule you want to include in your game, so you can find a comfortable zone in between arcade and real-life. You can even pick what kind of ref you want: lenient, average or strict. The only thing I had real problems with was line changing; I never could figure out how that worked. There's just as many control options. My personal favorite was the manual puck handling option. Instead of automatically handling the puck as you skate down the ice, you have to use the right analog stick to manually keep the puck going as you skate. When I first heard about a football game that threw out all the rules and focused on hard-hitting action, one of my first thoughts was 'Why didn't they make a hockey game like that?' Well unbeknownst to me, they did! So if you like hockey, NFL Blitz, or just beating the crap out of things on ice, you're bound to have some fun with NHL Hitz Pro.
-Alucard, GameVortex Communications AKA Stephen Triche
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