The goal horn blares, and arena music pumps through the speaker. You hear your coaches yelling at you to change lines. You feel the blades of your skates digging into the ice. EA Vancouver has made fantastic use of the DualSense controller, astonishingly enough producing one of the better uses of its gimmicks yet. I should note, however, that if you’re intent on picking up NHL 22, you’d be wise to do so on PS5 if possible. For every piece of the puzzle that the Frostbite engine has improved, it’s also working overtime to highlight just how unrealistic a large chunk of NHL 22 is. Stop to take a look at every player on the ice that isn’t touching the puck, and you’ll see a circus of skaters, spastically moving around and desperately trying to figure out where they need to go next. So much of NHL’s issue stems from the abysmal AI – both opponent and teammate – because they lack the ability to assess situations at the speed at which hockey is played. Frostbite might be a step forward for the NHL series, but it does nothing to make the game feel more like a simulation and less of an arcadey mess. I wrote about it in my preview article for NHL 22, but when EA was driving home the fact that Frostbite was coming to both last and current-gen consoles as a central selling point, it spoke volumes. The problem is we won’t truly see the fruits of its frosty labors until these games are no longer made for the previous generations’ systems. I don’t want to be mistaken – I do think the Frostbite engine is a fantastic update to the NHL series.
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