NHL 24: My Final Review n More
My review will pretty much just be touching the EASHL All Human 6’s side of things and gameplay.
EASHL I felt tried some ambitious stuff with giving us more customization whether you wanted it or not. The BattlePass they added wasn’t awful but the builds they pre-made sadly were kind of useless especially with most leagues banning these builds. I know lots of people don’t like the costumes they added but I found them kind of neat and I would have bought them if they weren’t tied down to builds. You can say it breaks realism or whatever you want. I don’t care much for how people look, but it’s the gameplay that really decides the games.
The menu system changes were semi-nice but still of course slow. While I’m not a huge fan of the modes character customization being able to be adjusted for everything you play it wasn’t that terrible once fixed.
Practice mode seems pretty barebones and could use some love in terms of allowing us to edit our builds without having to back out all the way.
As for gameplay…..
Elite Edges Gold either needs toned down so it’s not used like 90% of the time by everyone the ice or agility needs to seriously matter way more so there wouldn’t be such a huge need to use it.
I feel pucks just aren’t very lively overall rolling on the sides and such and bouncing over sticks from time to time off bad/errant passes.
Speed of course is King in the game and I’m semi OK with that, but for teams that want to setup properly in the zone there needs to be Size taking more of a stand allowing for better puck holding away from smaller weaker skaters.
The One Touch buttons while on paper and thought sounded awesome were just a trainwreck. Just revert back to the NHL 23 controls for online play and leave your 1 touch buttons for offline modes as an option.
Having the Hip Check as a 1 button press literally ruined the game so much. You allowed it to be too effective without getting called for penalties on plays that would warrant it. Half the time when a player should totally destroy someone with a check they instead went with the hipcheck because it was more effective, took more of their energy away which kept them down longer. You really should have disabled it for online play and forced people to learn the new checking method. Also you didn’t need points into checking or anything to be a god at this.
As for Bodychecking. I don’t mind the new way of hitting but it needs tweaks much like how Madden’s hit stick has evolved which I assume is your goal when you added this new way of hitting.
The traits/abilities need more balancing in terms of usefulness.
Passing this year has been pretty awesome. I am loving the one touch passes and the icon passing is pretty amazing and has allowed for me to get the puck more often than not to the correct people especially in a crowd. What needs a ton of work is the saucer pass in terms of speed. You need to ramp the speed up of a charge saucer pass. Right now it’s just way too slow. In fact I think there should be 2 new abilities for it.
- Heavy Sauce -
When charging up your saucer pass it will have more zip to it but potentially lower to the ice making it slightly easier to intercept.
- Light Sauce-
When saucing a non fully charged saucer pass the puck will get more air making it slightly harder to intercept but allowing to get over sticks, skates, laid out bodies.
Both of these would be a bit harder to corral as a receiver but you know what we have traits that are supposed to corral pucks so give it a use already.
Goalies in NHL 24 started off like a trainwreck. Whoever came up with the controls and ideas for the new way totally missed the mark and didn’t come close to make it more user friendly. Thankfully it got addressed and you made the position a bit better. The new animations for goalies going to their bums happens way too much on shots that shouldn’t warrant it at all. This needs greatly toned down. The whole stamina system for goalies is pretty terrible too. I’m sorry goalies don’t just magically get tired after facing like 3 shots in 10 seconds then a minute later. I’m ok with losing some stamina but the regain should recover much faster even if they didn’t invest big time into stamina. With how little shots we face in the game because everyone is always looking for that perfect shot we shouldn’t be so tired.
Things that need addressed for goalies is when in a butterfly their upper body needs to allow to move left or right to lean into shots. This would greatly help from shots on the side when the goalie goes into a butterfly and of course moves away from the post to allow pucks to go under their glove or blocker when in reality they would be leaning to get more of their body in the way and potentially even leaning into the post.
I feel like screens need to be more effective against goalies. Especially if your team is the one screening you. Most teams just all sit down low trying to block all the shots. I feel like you don’t punish them enough and reward defensemen shooting from the point enough. We don’t need everything to be deflected for results. We need the Lidstrom/Makar type goals where they can throw a well played wrist shot on net and get some goals. You have totally made defense pretty boring in the offensive zone unless they are skating with the puck and going in deep.
Also please for the love of everything let the goalie skate faster going to the bench.
Anyway I didn’t hate NHL 24 but I also didn’t love it either. I’ll give the game a solid 7/ out of 10. Gameplay needs improvements and really give us that 1080/120fps mode. It’s very important when it comes to the competitive scene. Look at all the shooters and such. They are twitch like games and so is NHL.
