I have been a big follower of EA's NHL series and every year it seems to be the same thing... Open the box, install the game, play the game, be disappointed... Play for a few days, tweak some settings, get used to it, enjoy the game more, change my opinion of it... Till this year. I have tweaked and changed options left and right and still find this game to be so disappointing.

EA's biggest raves about 2003 were the puck physics and enhanced AI, well the physics are just not much different than the previous years... take a shot with a man in front of you and he blocks it, takes it right on his stick and is skating the opposite direction of you before you know what happened. The goalie AI is better to a point, you can score different types of goals, but once the CPU thinks you have scored enough goals, you are not going to get anything past the weakest of goalies.

Another annoying factor is that the CPU will score at will when it is losing, your only defense is to try and knock down everyone in your path to try and stop them from getting a shot off.

The game gets old, very fast when playing single player vs the CPU. The only saving grace is when playing multi player against someone who is on the same CPU with you. Not over the internet since EA still can't get the frame rate done correctly to have good online play.

My one plus this year would have to be the Menu system which lays everything out for you pretty well. No more going through 4 different sub screens to get the information you want. This was a nice improvement.

Every year EA steps up and makes a good adjustment or 2, but always manage to take out or un-improve 3 elements. If they could combine all versions of the NHL series and take certain areas from each, they would have an awsome game.

Recommended: No