X-Abrupto

People are so damn easy to anger when it comes down to video games. Do they even realize the Poker Night franchise is like a mini-game made by the folks at Telltale? This isn't a normal franchise that a dev will invest on. Telltale's employees were going to get paid for nothing since they were ahead of time on their schedule for their main games. So, they decided to work on some other game in-between and that's how Poker Night 1 and 2 saw the light of day. Alright, so maybe it won't justify the occasional freezes, but at least you can't expect it to be a big budget blockbuster like GTA, for the love of Miyamoto! Yeah, it does freeze a lot. And it is annoying. And it will indeed affect my rating. Now let's move on, shall we? This game is funny. You're bound to know a least one of the 4 characters sitting at the table - they are so diverse and they all have their own fans. The interaction between them is hilarious. Whoever wrote the dialogues for this game should do stand up. The conversations keep you entertained and are very similar to real life poker games - of course, you don't talk with robots or talking dogs, but you will chat about all sorts of things. It has a relaxed laid-back feeling to it which is, to me, essential in poker games. The character animations are nicely done and so are the graphics, considering this isn't a big budget game. The music is especially good. It features new renditions of songs heard in Borderlands, Army of Darkness, Venture Bros and Sam & Max and they're all nice, smooth jazz tunes. It adds an atmosphere to the game for sure. Once you unlock stuff, you end up unlocking new "levels" that come with new songs as well, so there's a lot of diversity here for a poker game. Now, this game only is playable offline, so the IA had to be good. And it is pretty good for a AI. Sure, it will sometimes behave abnormally ( going all in with just a pair of 6's with no cards on the table yet ), but most of the time, it will simulate real players in a pretty believable manner. It can bluff relatively well. After some hours, you can identify the AI's behavior and have a pretty good idea of what to come, but it's still better than the vast majority of poker AI's out there. In comparison, the Red Dead Redemption poker AI is mentally challenged. Poker Night's AI will not let you win easily, that's for sure, but it is not "cheating" at all. It's simply aware of the % of chances it might or might not win with the cards it has. It might be a little more ahead of you in that department, but if you are slightly experinced at the game, you'll hold your own pretty well. Don't believe those who claim this game is too difficult or impossible to beat. It's just a good simulation of what an average poker game is in real life with people who actually know what they are doing. I noticed there's a way to get the players drunk by paying them drinks. I never really saw the so-called effects of the drinks. The game says the characters are more prone to show their emotions which could tell whether or not they have a good hand. Sure, some animations do tell, but sometimes it's just confusing. How are you supposed to know Claptrap is bluffing when the dude's a robot? Unfortunately, once you've figured out the AI, the game becomes easier and easier and the dialogues end up repeating over and over again. There's no multiplayer ( that could've been the redeeming factor - too bad ). This game lacks replay value once you've unlocked everything. If Telltale really wants this franchise to become a serious poker franchise, they need to add multiplayer in their next installment of Poker Night.

So, yeah, MAG is dead. Its servers have been down for a lil' while already so why am I wasting my time typing a review for a game nobody will be able to play? Because MAG was a pioneering, underestimated FPS and it deserves at least a few minutes of my time, for posterity. Since this game is now dead, I'll write a review but I'll also add my little story concerning the game and why it ultimately failed to find its way in the very tight and ruthless FPS market which is almost under the complete grasp of two gigantic franchises, Battlefield and Call of Duty. I got the beta of MAG before its release. I immediately fell in love with a few aspects of the game. The first one was the whole teamwork concept. We're still in the prehistoric age of online gaming. Most players who play shooter games will toss aside the whole teamwork aspect, going in like Rambo. Well, MAG forced you to work with other players in order to achieve victory. That wasn't new for the genre, but the fact that you had squads and platoons, the vast use of headsets and the respawn which had a countdown so that you could reappear with your squadmates all encouraged and enforced teamwork. The second thing that really got me interested was the overall difficulty of the game which was due to its realism. Once again, teamwork was essential here if you wanted to survive. Also, you had to aim at the right body area to kill someone effectively. Most shooter games sure will make you deal more damage with head shots, but many will allow you to kill someone with a single sniper bullet in the foot and that's something I always hated - it removed the realism I was looking for. MAG was not an ordinary shooter. Heck, I'm not even sure you could see it as a FPS because it was so different from the other FPS at the time. The main reason for this was the vast amount of players who would kill each other in each and every game. With over 200 players simutaneously, this game was more of a war simulation than a video game to me. Another thing I loved was the fact that the game didn't really reward you for killing people. Sure, you'd get experience for kills, but in order to win, you had to destroy or conquer objectives which forced you to come up with strategies. You couldn't camp in this game and be part of the victory effort at the same time. When the game was released, it faced some harsh criticism. The thing is, many so-called pro reviewers played the beta and hypocritically wrote their review on the real game that they barely played. I've noticed a trend in pro video game reviews ( especially with IGN ) where they want to release their review ASAP ( to get the upper hand against other video game websites ) and they will often base themselves on betas... So yeah that's my opinion for the early and bad reviews of MAG. The critics of this game hurt its sells for sure but MAG wasn't perfect either. There were 3 factions in this game and one called SVER was overpowered for a very, very long time. Not only were the weapons better but the maps were strategically easier to defend as a SVER whilst the RAVEN faction was the complete opposite. The whole idea of factions was terrible. It split players in 3. If a friend chose to join VALOR and you were in SVER, you couldn't play with him, you were forced to play against him. They should've given up on factions and focused on clans instead. Zipper put a lot of effort into improving their game based on the gaming community. I have to give credit to them, because I think they spent a lot of time ( and money ) on patching it up. In the end, they kinda got rid of part of the faction problem by allowing, example, RAVEN players to defend maps of SVER. They did their best to recalibrate overpowered guns - unfortunately, to the point of nerfing some of them. The main flaw with this game was not the number of players ( I've rarely seen a laggy game despite playing with people from Japan, Australia, France, Brazil, etc. etc. ), but the size of the maps. They made the maps so huge that even if there were tens and tens of players, you would sometime have to run for an extended period of time before you actually encountered an enemy. All they had to do was to keep the same number of players but reduce the maps. This would've led to more action and less dull moments, especially after you respawned. This game was not only a pioneer in the number of players ( I'm sure this will be a norm in the upcoming years ), but also in the whole military hierarchy department. Squad leaders, platoon leaders and officers in command were ordinary players like you and me who had more experience than others and were given some extra power to influence the course of the battle. Once you were one of those, you could really tell that a good leader in this game was often the reason for a victory or a defeat. Battfield 4 recently implemented a similar concept in their game so I think people have noticed the potential of leaders in FPS games.

This game totally went under my radar until recently. I played the original XCOM game back in the mid-90's and I kept seeing people talking about this game called XCOM: Enemy Unknown, not realizing they actually remade it a couple of years ago. As soon as I figured it out, I went and got it. I don't think there are comparisons to be made with the original XCOM/UFO Enemy Unknown game despite the various similarities. This game has two major flaws. The first one is that it doesn't look good. Its uninspired main screen menu tells you it doesn't aim to be visually beautiful. It's not a big budget game with mindblowing graphics. I even wonder why they didn't chose to do cinematics with real actors instead of poorly animated computerd generated characters. Live acting would've reduced the cost ( it's a 2 days work, really ) and it would've made the game look better overall. But that's a personal opinion, of course. The second flaw, and probably the most important one, is that this game is unforgiving and brutal. It's not a Ninja Gaiden Black or Dark Souls type of challenge that forces you to sharpen your skills by practicing - and ultimately defeating the game with a feeling of accomplishment. This XCOM game is just ruthless and you can't do a thing about it. There's only a tiny difference of difficulty between easy and normal, and the normal mode is very, very hard. The game doesn't tell you what to do to augment your chances of winning, especially concerning everything surrounding the base management. It won't tell you how to make profits and how to augment your chances of victory. There's a lot of stuff you get to learn by yourself at the cost of tens and tens of hours of gaming filed with what I'd call gamer ****. You are most likely to restart your game once or twice. By the third time you play, you probably will master most of the elements of the game, but it's still very hard to beat. The combat mode is probably the best part of the game. Those who like military strategy will fall in love with this game. It's the strategic aspect of the game that kept me from giving up on it after realizing I had to invest on satellites when it was way too late. The combat mode can be very gratifying if you come up with strategies as you fight your enemies. If you send your squad to random spots without thinking of the consequences, you're most likely to get a severe beating at the hands of a formidable AI that could reduce Garry Kasparov to tears. But then again, the difficulty of the game catches up and you'll find yourself in terrible situations more than once. Your soldiers will die and you will fail some missions unless you save and load repeatedly. The AI isn't to blame here, because if you have a smart AI, why make it dumb to alleviate the difficulty? All they had to do was to reduce their hit points and reduce the damage they could deal to you to make the game easier. But it seems the people who made this game really wanted to make it almost impossible to play for an average gamer who can't spend days playing a single video game before he actually manages to understand the mechanics of the said game. Many so-called hardcore gamers will tell you this game is just like the old school games and that it was made difficult willingly. Sorry, but I don't agree. The good ol' hard games were hard because they were poorly designed and had close to no beta testing whatsoever. Battletoads, Friday the 13th, etc. etc. they were hard games because the people who made them had no idea on how to reduce the difficulty - or they simply didn't care. There's hard and then there's hell-worthy hard. This game falls in the second category. There's also something that bugs me in the combat mode. Sometimes I put my soldiers in specific areas, thinking they will get a higher accuracy percentage, but it turns out they don't. I think this game required a little more tweaking here and there concerning this department. Scenario-wise, it's very boring. They missed the opportunity of hiring a good writer who could've come up with a respectable story. Instead, we get dialogues worthy of a 10 year old boy playing with action figures. The music is pretty good in this game. It's highly reminiscent of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but it still holds its own. There are some good tunes in this game. Ultimately, this game is still amazing despite the harsh criticism I have on it concerning the difficulty. You end up getting the upper hand of it, but it takes so much time ( definitely 20hours+ required to know what you're doing ). I mean, we either go to school or have jobs. Sorry to put it this way but let's be honest here. This game will only be loved uncondtionally by people who don't have a life. Normal people who play video games a couple of hours once in a while will quickly give up on it. I think that commercially speaking, this game is a failure since it only appeals to a very tiny portion of gamers out there.

After learning how to play guitar successfully with the first Rocksmith I couldn't but buy this one, not only because I wanted to support Ubisoft for finally delivering a good game/program which truly teaches guitar, but also because I thought it would be fun to learn some new songs. Surprisingly, there are many improvements with this one. Loading times are almost non-existent, the menu is quicker and more intuitive, the lessons are much more numerous and you can learn a lot more than you did with the first game. The songs offered with the game are more diversified and although we still get too much indy rock and not enough blues, we still get the feeling the guys who chose the tracks had the mission to improve their catalogue. They got rid of the crowd/venues which made the game lag. They took the Guitarcade games and remade them so that they would be more fun and less frustrating. Good job! With the first Rocksmith, they figured out that nobody cared about the number of guitars you could unlock, and they reinvented their sound forge. They added a nice mode, called "session mode" which simply lets you improvise whatever you want, accompanied by an interactive band. Just the fact that you can play guitar and hear yourself wherever you may be on the menu is an improvement to me. They even took the time to modify and augment the precision of past songs. For example, Breaking the Law by Judas Priest didn't have slides during their chorus in the first Rocksmith. They corrected it in Rocksmith 2014 and you can now play the real song exactly like the real band played it. One thing, however, that I really don't appreciate, is the fact that they charge around 10 bucks to transport your first Rocksmith songs to the new Rocksmith. I'm not talking about the DLC you might have bought those automatically end up in your new repertory. No, I'm talking about the 50-ish songs you already bought when you bought the first Rocksmith. You already paid for those songs and they want to charge you for simply transferring them to their new game? That's rubbish and that's why they don't get 10/10. Other games such as Littlebigplanet 2 let you import your Littlebigplanet 1 content at no additional cost. What should come next? Online multiplaye and a recording studio. Online multiplayer would be a great addition, as long as lag isn't involved. It's hard to come upon fellow guitarists in real life unless you already have friends who are musicians, but if you have access to other Rocksmithers all around the world, it would be so fun to jam together, whether it be death metal with a Norwegian or blues with an American. Secondly, a recording studio should be the next big step for Rocksmith... Give us the power to record songs, turn them into mp3s or something and upload them on servers hosted by Ubisoft so that others can listen to us and rate us!

To make it short, this game is like the child of World of Warcraft, Fable and Dragon Age games. It has that cute design Fable has, it has the gigantic map and huge quest amount just like WOW and the menus and HUD are very similar to Dragon Age. Alas, it can't beat any of those three champions in the action/RPG genre. Kingdoms of Amalur is an immense game. The map is one of the biggest I've seen. The side quests come in legions although they can be repetitive over time. The main quests are quite diverse and hold the biggest part of action and originality the game can offer. There's days and days of content. Alas, the redundancy of the quests and the lack of complexity in the fighting side of the game makes the whole gaming experience tedious after a while. This game is beautiful in terms of scenery. So beautiful that it looks like there's too much going on. After a while, you get used to the beauty of the landscapes and pay little attention to what you see. Too much is like not enough. The faces of the characters are dull and lack expression. It is not acceptable nowadays. They look like they are from a game made in 2004. The music is sometimes convincing but lacks originality. Many songs are similar to other RPG titles that have come before it. Same thing goes with the sound effects which are generic at best. Your characters and the various NPCs you encounter barely have a personality. Only the characters seen in the main quests have something going for them but they remain RPG and fantasy/aventure clichés. It's very unfortunate because **** like Amalur can't compete with other games in the graphics department, it should be able to add more depth to the characters and storylines to redeem itself. Alas, it doesn't, so you will often feel like you are playing some sort of a huge mod. The ennemies are pretty diversified and many are quite original in their own way although they are mostly inspired by other games. As a conclusion this game is far from being bad, it's huge, beautiful and the loading times are pretty much non-existent... But it lacks what it takes to escape the etiquette of being an emulation. Its lack of originality, repeating quests and poor graphics can only make me give it 6/10.

Ok guys just have a look at the profiles of those who wrote positive reviews on this piece of crap. Either they are brand new users who just happen to rate this game a 10 or they just give 10's to everything. People like that are paid by the companies who make the games. It's a kind of trend on internet. Companies hire people so they can write as many positive reviews as possible about their products and write negative reviews about the products of others. They are especially numerous when it comes down to video games. These guys are a cancer to internet purity! Also, this game is terrible, my buddy who is a huge fan of Walking Dead GAVE the game to me today because he was so disappointed... Need I say more?! Now I'm stuck with this thing and I will try to resell it to the used video games store for 10 bucks... Wish me luck!

I will tell you right away. If you have given up on playing guitar in the past, this game is for you. But it is, of course, also for those who already play guitar. I used to play when I was a teenager and I had a very bad teacher who put way too much pressure on me back in the day. My poor little Epiphone spent years in the closet collecting dust until my friend ( who is the best guitarist I know and plays in a band ) told me about Rocksmith. He said " This is the game you have been waiting for, it's like a teacher and it adjusts to your skills, it's like Guitar Hero except that you will play the real thing and learn how to play real guitar. ". At first I was sceptical but after viewing a bunch of videos and seeing my friend playing Rocksmith himself I decided to give it a go and bought it. The fact that you don't have to buy the Rocksmith guitar to play was a big relief since I couldn't really afford the guitar at the time. Any electric guitar can work with this game. It will detect your guitar's sound and tell you to adjust it if needed. At first you will play a few notes, then the game will eventually make you play on more than a couple of strings, then it will introduce you to chords and additional techniques. It never overwhelms you with content, it softly puts the knowledge into your lap and inevitably you will be seduced into raising the difficulty and learning more thanks to the points and ranks system. Once in a while you will unlock new items such as guitars and pedals. So you will end up having a huge studio at your disposal in the comfort of your living room. At first I was scared that I would develop technical flaws while learning. But this game teaches you guitar almost subconsciously by repeating riffs over and over. At some point it will all be printed in your memory forever and always, and you will know the sound the guitar will make instinctively no matter where your fingers lay. My youngest sister who is 10 can already play Nirvana and Blur songs at 100% so I dare say anybody can learn to play guitar, all you need is to play a couple of hours everyday and you will be able to play most of the songs at 100% in a matter of months ( I did it and I don't consider myself that good of a learner ). Now I am moving on and Rocksmith isn't enough for me. Guitar tabs are not a mystery to me anymore so I am now learning songs the game didn't offer!! Trust me, this game is revolutionary and those who give it a bad review are those who can't stand having their little fingers getting hurt for a couple of weeks. A negative review of this game is nonsensical, an amateur like me, a pro like my friend and a little girl aged 10 can play this game and enjoy it. Don't believe the red reviewers!

I was browsing through Metacritic and couldn't help but notice this game had a below-than-expected user rating. So I must do this masterpiece justice by writing one of my own. In my opinion, MGS 4 is a glimpse of what games will be in the future: movies in which you will interact. Right when the menu pops up you get the feeling this game is different. I won't lie, I am a huge fan of this franchise since I played Metal Gear on NES. I consider Metal Gear Solid 4 to be the best of all. Snake, the main character, has never been so likeable, and even those who never knew him will soon enough love this guy. He's old, he's fighting enemies far stronger than him. He endures pain throughout the game, yet he never gives up. And he still has time to make us smile with his "simple soldier" reactions as he interacts with the other characters. This game is flawless. The animation still competes and even beats most games. The movement of the different characters, vehicles, and natural objects is extremely well made. The atmosphere of this game is incredible. The sound effects are top notch and the music comes in at the right moment to add more intensity to what is happening on the screen. The graphics are still very, very good. I believe they finally were equalled a couple of years ago by a few other games. This game's scenario is perhaps the only bad thing about it. It's complicated even for Metal Gear fanatics. The cutscenes are long, yes, but they can easily be equals to movie scenes you watch in theaters. Many of them are breathtaking in terms of epicness, and others add more character to the different people involved in the story. You will forever remember how you felt throughout your first playthrough of this game, it's so intense that you will sometimes think about it after playing it. You can complete levels in various ways depending on your style. Solid Snake is an expert at CQC ( Closed Quarters Combat ), and once you are sure enough of your skills, you will enjoy knocking out your enemies a lot more than simply shooting them. You have many many gadgets to help you in your quest and you can unlock many more as you play. Many have a cartoony feeling to it, such as the legendary cardboard box in which you can hide to avoid detection. There are no trophies for this game since it was released in the pre-trophy era of the PS3. This game has an online mode and it's lots of fun. You can do pretty much everything you do in solo mode. There's even a game mode that allows people to be Snake and his remote controlled robot while both teams fight each other. Some players have become experts now, and you might have a hard time winning, which can lead to frustration. You can, however, access a training area and be trained by one of the experts who can teach you how to play online. This game was already a classic the day it came out. It will forever be remembered by those who played it. In retrospect I believe nobody can give this game a bad note, it has to be 9 or 10. Those who gave it a lower note should not be worthy of writing reviews. This game is pretty much a cornerstone in video gaming and was, to me, the symbol of what PS3 ( and other same-gen consoles ) were going to do in the upcoming years.

Let's say it already: The trailer for this game is actually better than the game itself. But it's still not that bad. This game is as fun as it is frustrating. If you do not play it long enough, most chances are that you will hate it, because it is hard and the controls are gameplay are sketchy. Killing a single zombie can be a tedious experience at first. There are definitely influences of other games in Dead Island: Fallout 3, Borderlands and Left 4 Dead to name the most obvious. I'd say it is pretty much like Borderlands with zombies, but that wouldn't make justice to both games. Dead Island sure tries a lot of stuff, but you will sometimes feel like it is a fake sandbox game. Something is lacking in this game to make it great. You will stop counting the times you have tried to go somewhere and the games tells you that you're out of the play zone. This game is glitchy. There are a lot of clipping issues, physics are not quite right ( try kicking a beach ball ) and the zombies do not behave normally. By that I mean that they will sometimes refuse to go somewhere, simply because they were not designed by the game creators to go there. This game is mostly a hack & slash. You will get firearms, but the amount of ammo is ridiculously low, especially if you consider the fact that you can hold an almost infinite number of items in your inventory ( example, 30 medkits ) when compared to the 50-ish number of bullets you can carry. The sounds that zombies make are repetitive, and the NPCs will also repeat themselves over and over again as you walk nearby. There is a great lack of depth in this department. The main quests are fun and diversified. The side quests are the complete opposite, and will often involve the same thing: bring item(s) to NPC. The whole scenario of the main quest is somewhat ridiculous and very basic, if not a pale copy of b-movies. The playable characters lack personality. The men especially are very generic and unoriginal. They have put a lot of effort in the customization of weapons. I wish they could've tried harder and gave us the possibility to create and modifiy our own fortifications. There aren't a lot of vehicles in Dead Island, but driving them is fun. I'd compare the handling of the trucks to Battlefield games. There's also an aspect that lacks in Dead Island, it's the whole survival thing. In Zombie movies/games, survival is always an important part of the atmosphere. In Dead Island, the amount of snack bars and soda cans is infinite, and you will often wonder why NPCs need food so much, since it's all over the place. It would have been more fun to find food and make stashes of it to feed yourself and other people. There's another issue in Dead Island, it's the fact that you will kill a zombie, leave the area for 1 minute, come back, and another zombie will be there. The corpses of killed zombies disappear as soon as you turned around and walked a few meters away from it. It removes realism to the game, and it's the realism of zombie games that make them scary... So Dead Island will be scary for the first 15 minutes, but as you get used to it, you will know where the zombies will come from, and what to expect at every corner. This game crashes frequently, and those involved with patching the game do not seem to care. The graphics are actually kinda good, but aren't the best either. The music is not very good. The game still tried to do something different, and online play is still fun despite the crash rates.

This game is pretty much just like when Mario Bros 2 came out. It was still fun, but when people thought of Mario Bros, they would think about the first one. LBP 2 is mostly a huge DLC of LBP 1. The graphics are slightly improved, but to be honest I think they simply added more contrast and lighting and that's it. I believe this game is still revolutionary even though it is the second opus. The improved logic makes it possible to create almost anything you want. The Sackboys are the second best addition. It is sad, however, that you can't have a pet Sackboy to bring through the various levels to keep you company while other players aren't there with you. The music is pretty much just like LBP 1 - original, refreshing, diversified. This time you can actually compose your own songs as well, and it's a lot less tedious than it's predecessor. This game is a must buy for anyone who has some creative instincts. Do not buy it if you do not have internet access. This game will be easily boring if you play story mode only. You must try to get a touch of the community, then you will realize this game has an infinite content. Lag is still an issue. You can play with people in your continent just fine, but player with people overseas is very difficult. If they want this franchise to become very famous ( right now it is only a little famous ), they will have to add a lot of content for LBP3 or else the fan base will begin to diminish. The fun thing with this game is that it is constantly positive, and it seems to have a positive effect on those who play it. This game is relaxing, I've never met someone raging while playing this game. You will spend most of your time trying to create something you might never finish, but it doesn't matter. Playing this game is pretty much like drawing or painting. it removes your daily frustrations and makes you feel good about yourself. Anybody can play this game and have fun. I play FPS games and I still love LBP2.

This is probably the best Magic: The Gathering game I've played. I think I played most of them. I'd dare to say it is the best card fighting video game, even though it does have flaws. I truly don't understand why they do not allow building your own deck. Maybe they are afraid more experienced players would destroy newcomers. This could be easily avoided if you would create two branches of online play, one with basic decks and the other one with custom decks. As of now, you can only remove or add cards to your deck, and you are forced to chose from a single deck. If you compare the quality of the game and its price ( currently $9.99 ), then it is a very, very good game. The drawings, images and animations are good. The music is much better than the previous versions. The game is a little faster, especially if you compare with the first Duels of the Planeswalkers, which is good. The AI is quite good, but does not make plans for future turns unlike most players, so it will sometimes waste cards to prevent you from doing something early, and you will end up beating it in a long term since it will often run out of useful cards. The sound effects are sometimes irritating. They can be loud and very edgy. I can't believe they do not allow custom soundtracks. Online play is very fun, although sometimes you will encounter players that have very little mercy. Free For All is usually unfair. Sometimes players will secretly team up to take you down first. The ladder system is very weird. They should have a basic ladder of win/loss ratio and a skills ratio ( if you play vs very good people, you get a higher ratio ). To be honest I have yet to understand how their ladder works. If you don't have a mic, you are doomed, because you will pretty much never hear other people. If you have a mic, however, be careful not to talk too much about your cards, as other people might notice and could have what it takes to take it out of your hand. The lack of customization delivers a solid blow to my final score to a game that could've easily had a 8.5 out of 10.

EA has the monopoly in most sports games and it shows. They barely improve their games over the years and not much is done to fix the obvious problems. It's the realism of hockey they have yet to capture, and NHL 11 unfortunately does nothing to change this. The animations are either too stiff or too relaxed, their movement rarely looks natural. Only the goalie is very well done. The crowd still looks like Sims in Sims 1. They need to improve this. Unfortunately the physics have not improved. Therefore instead of tripping on a fallen player, you simply "push him" on the ice. Every time you check a player, it's as if there is a cushion that alters the impact of the hit, and checking rarely is fun to do, you have the impression that you didn't deliver a strong enough hit most of the time. There's some problems with noises and sounds. The crowd will sometimes react over something insignificant while you might do something else that could be the promise **** play, and there's no reaction from the attendance. I don't understand why they are not putting the real coaches behind the bench. Penalties ( especially when playing against the AI ) are often weird. For example, you will check a player during the whistle, and while the game is stopped, he will chase you without hitting you. Doesn't matter, you both get a penalty over this, even if there wasn't any contact after the whistle. The be a pro mode is interesting, but you quickly realize that the "coach" doesn't make his decisions based on the entire team. If you end up moving up or down a line it's only because of what you did, not what the other players did. They need to add a french announcer to Montreal and Ottawa games and they need to put the real songs that are played when a team scores instead of a random song. I know these are very small details, but these details lack in great numbers, and all of them combined remove the realism that most of us are looking for. On another note I would like to point out that EA are greedy as hell. If you buy this game in used form, you must pay to play online. Now that wouldn't be a problem if EA wouldn't shut their servers down a couple of years after the release of most of their games. It's time for EA to step their game up, hire some Canadians who actually know what hockey is and make them recreate this franchise. Right now it looks like a corpse that you keep trying to reanimate and it doesn't look good. For the positive remarks, there are many, many teams to choose from. You can play with CHL teams or european teams, the choices are extremely various. Most of the game modes are fun and well done. Being a General Manager is fun, but it lacks the depth and, especially, algorithms that made Eastside ( a computer game where you'd be a GM ) famous. The songs are all good ones, although some are merely playing in arenas, some other are already famous ( Joe Satriani's song, for example, is often used in arenas in real life ). I kinda wish they could've added some old school stuff like "We Will Rock You" and "The Good Ol' Hockey Game".