NHL 27: Better Gameplay, Shockingly Bad Presentation

I was genuinely excited for NHL 27. I play this series over 1,000 hours a year and I’ve been playing since around NHL 06, so this is coming from someone who spends an unreasonable amount of time with these games.

I mostly play Be a Pro, but I think a lot of this applies to the overall quality of the game.

Honestly, I’m pretty disappointed with this year’s edition.

For a yearly release on current-gen hardware, the presentation feels shockingly unpolished. The new goal celebrations, skating back to the bench, crowd reactions, fist bumps, and a lot of the presentation animations look incredibly choppy. At times, they genuinely look unacceptable for a PS5 game, especially considering I’m playing on a PS5 Pro.

Visually, I actually feel like NHL 26 looked better in certain areas. NHL 27 does seem to have improved lighting and ray tracing in some situations, but the overall presentation doesn’t feel like the upgrade that was advertised.

One thing that made me laugh was creating my Be a Pro player. I went through the face presets and I swear every single option either looked like a premature baby or an accountant. Nobody looked remotely like an athlete. Maybe I’m shallow, and obviously this is completely subjective, but if I’m creating a professional hockey player, I don’t necessarily want him looking like the guy working the night shift at my local gas station. The face presets are brutal.

That being said, I do have to give EA credit where it’s deserved: the gameplay itself is noticeably better.

The AI feels smarter, positioning seems improved, and the actual flow of hockey feels much more natural. Once you’re actually playing, the game feels smoother and more enjoyable than NHL 26. From a pure gameplay standpoint, I’m pretty happy with the direction they went.

My biggest disappointment is really the presentation because that was such a major part of the marketing this year. The crowd, celebrations, bench animations and general atmosphere were supposed to make the game feel more alive, but instead some of those animations are so awkward and choppy that they actually pull me out of the immersion.

So far, NHL 27 feels like a game where the actual hockey improved, but everything surrounding the hockey needed significantly more polish.

Gameplay: definite improvement.

Presentation and graphical polish: major disappointment.

For a franchise I spend over 1,000 hours a year playing, I was expecting a lot more from the overall package.