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NHL Eastside Hockey Manager 2005 Review November 29, 2005 |
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Summary: Sports Interactive games comes out swinging in the first period with NHL Eastside Hockey Manager 2005, taking on all comers and plowing through them like Cam Neely through a soft New York Islanders defense. How does a game with no fancy 3D graphics, no guns, no world conquest score 90% on FiringSquad? Read on!
 Overview | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
To give you some background, picture this: I’m sitting at home playing my brand-new Xbox 360 and a half dozen different games for a big feature we have coming up. A package arrives at the door, I open it and see two games for the PC, NHL Eastside Hockey Manager 2005 and Worldwide Soccer Manager 2006. Being the Canadian that I am, I reluctantly give up the 360 and install, of course, the hockey game on the PC. The back of the box looks remarkably bleak, no 3D, no high-res graphics – heck, no way to actually play the game. Oh well, I was always a fan of managing in Sega’s NHL 2K series.
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I fumble around with the interface which, although it is competent, goes about matters in non-standard ways and is generally overwhelmed by the raw amount of options, data and inputs a player can give. What am I doing, playing a game that’s stuck at 1024x768 on my shiny new Dell 2001FP? Oh well, maybe I can trade for Alexander Ovechkin, Eric Staal or Sidney Crosby for some first-round draft picks. What? Denied? What’s this game doing – NHL 2K6 would be all over that like butter on toast!
At about 7AM, with the pre-dawn glow peeking over the horizon, I look at the lackluster record my Oilers have managed so far this season – 26-37-3. I cleared the roster of some dead weight to free up cap space, and I picked up Mats Sundin on the cheap after the Leafs dumped his bloated salary. However, I’d also totally botched coaching, and had to pick up almost as much garbage as I’d dumped, in order to fill in holes left by injuries. Worst of all, many of these recent pickups proved to be impossible to dispose of in trades and no one bit when they were on waivers. Clearly, this is not your father’s Buick, or his hockey management sim. The management depth that EHM 2005 offers is nothing short of the legendary capabilities of Football Manager – which should come as no surprise to those who know both games were developed by the same company.
| A second run | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
I was crushed. I’d spent days managing the team, getting the best coaches, making great strides in practice with the players, and even figuring out a tactic that generally worked well throughout most of the season. I’d invested some thirty hours over two days into building this team that had, albeit briefly, danced around 1st place in the western conference only to collapse. With the owners expecting a playoff appearance, I resigned as soon as the Sharks beat me in the second-last game of the season. Unbelievable as it is, that was one of the most emotionally draining experiences a game has ever produced, simply because I invested so much into it.
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NHL Eastside Hockey Manager compares to NHL 2K6’s management mode the way a Lamborghini Murcielago compares to a 1977 Honda Civic. Both do roughly the same thing, but one of them is much, much better at it. NHL 2K6 lets you trade players and draft picks, sign new players, and release unneeded ones. NHL Eastside Hockey Manager makes sure you care for the fitness of your players, hire the right assistant coaches to help out in practice and get the best out of your rookies and vets alike, the best head coach you can find, a good scouting staff and of course trainers to properly diagnose and treat injuries.
Of course, all this is on top of an impressive trade and signing system. The AI is very, very savvy about who it lets go and for what. Don’t expect your team to be comprised of the Western Conference All-Stars. In fact, you should expect to be very careful in your initial offers and weighing player concerns quite carefully. In an apparent concession to gameplay, the actual negotiations are very limited – rarely does a notable free agent last long enough on the market to be tendered more than one or two offers. Often, they take a great while to accept or reject them – or they don’t even bother.
| The game | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
Players have a wild assortment of stats, preferences and attributes – some hidden. It takes scouting to reveal a player’s physical and mental attributes, and skills, but these can change. Furthermore, scouts can only guess at a player’s potential, and even the best scouts are wrong sometimes. Players can seem very good in the minors and destined for greatness in the pros, but once they arrive on the scene many are unable to take the next step. Often this is tied to their potential limitations, but sometimes it’s because they were brought up too early to the pros and not given a chance to develop at a more reasonable pace. You may think you need some hotshot rookie center now, but odds are he’ll struggle. A year or two of terrorizing the competition in the minors could be just what the doctor ordered.
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As manager, you have the option of coaching the games yourself. You can set line-by-line strategies and individual player mentalities, though the actual consequences of these changes are not fully explained. Obviously having an offense-minded team produces more chances for you and your opponent, but what you won’t know is how you’ll stack up against a team that uses the neutral zone trap or prefers a finesse defensive style of hockey. The counters to each strategy are just not explained. Of course, it isn’t a good idea to change tactics too often either – it appears to reduce the players’ capability at any single one of them. Going back to that Oilers season that broke my heart, none of my players averaged over a point per game, but when I resigned and let the AI run a team whose roster was virtually unchanged, the top two scorers – Smyth and Daze – both made 120+ point runs in the regular season. Clearly, even by handing off the running of practice and coaching to the head coach, there was something missing. The game and manual must do a better job of explaining what works.
Running solely in 2D menus at 1024x768, EHM 2005 isn’t exactly pretty, but it isn’t unattractive either. Perhaps it’s a legacy of my being brought up on DOS games, but the game’s lack of visual appeal is not significant. The lack of sound and music isn’t bothersome either. In fact, for what is essentially a giant database tied to a fancy spreadsheet, Eastside Hockey Manager is quite an attractive title.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
Pros
Depth
The number of options available to the player as GM are incredible. Not only do you sign and trade players, but you can lose your job, get re-hired, gain reputation, lose it, or try to work two jobs at once (such as running the Oilers and the Canadian Olympic team).
Stats
Baseball fans may be notorious for their love of esoteric statistics, but this is just as true for all sports fans. NHL EHM definitely delivers on this level, with career stats for players that go back to their days in the minors.
Simulation
Although far from being completely accurate, and scoring seems to be tied to 2003-2004 levels rather than the new and improved 2005-2006 season, the game does an excellent job of simulating the capabilities of teams.
Cons
Manual
The manual is good for its size, but it should be much bigger. It fails to explain anything but the basics about any given concept – good luck finding a resource that suggests the best way to beat a team using the neutral zone trap, for example.
Interface
It’s not poor, just shy of being able to handle the monumental task at hand. For example, when deciding what each coach will teach in practice, it’d be really handy to see all their stats at once – too bad, you have to click them individually, memorize their best categories, go back, and compare – by hand.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |