The bigger issue with NHL 22 is mostly superficial. Being able to deke without a speed penalty is a nice bonus to have here and there, but nowhere near the superpower that NHL 22 makes it out to be. For all the integration, however, their effectiveness feels awfully insignificant in execution, and in some cases, invisible all together. Those X-Factors seamlessly blend into the NHL’s modern playstyle and NHL 22’s still-exquisite right analog stick puck handling control scheme the latter’s precision gets better with each annual game. The impact of those abilities is kept in check by the fact that each team only has a handful of such stars, so it’s not as if every player on the ice has a special ability. The idea being that these videogamey skill boosts represent a player’s specific skillset.
Some star players gain speed boosts, others better shot accuracy after a deke, or shot power while skating. Instead, the changes are mostly those X-Factors, which do make rational sense in context. So in that respect, no news is good news. On the other hand, it doesn’t look dramatically better than NHL 21, as you’d expect for the first game designed to impress on a new generation of consoles. The change is almost invisible, which is something of a triumph when you consider that Madden NFL still hasn’t fully recovered technically after it made the switch four years ago. It should be noted that this is the first NHL game to run on the Frostbite engine – important to say because you probably wouldn’t know it otherwise. Given the near-total lack of penalty calls except for the most severe infractions (even with the penalty slider cranked high), NHL 22 takes steps toward this fantastical style and yet doesn’t fully embrace it.
It recalls the series’ growing pains in the early ‘00s where the slapstick, arcade-style play ruled before giving way to a fealty to the real sport. And thus, NHL 22 finds itself conflicted. Now universal across NHL, Madden NFL, and FIFA, these shatter the simulation aspects these respective sports brands were previously known for. Decades later, such skills now turned into X-Factors, giving certain star players special moves. That innovation was a quick piece of showy stick play that made dodging a defender easier, at the expense of realism. Pieces of NHL 22 feel like a callback to NHL 95, which introduced the spin-o-rama.