Metacritic Reception: NHL 10

Longtime developer of Electronic Arts’ NHL series of hockey games — and the country’s biggest studio — Vancouver’s EA Canada recently released the latest entry in the annual franchise: NHL 10. In this feature we analyze how the game fared with critics via its Metacritic ranking.

The PS3 version of the game currently holds an overall score of 87%, which puts it in the same realm as the last two releases: NHL 09 received an overall score of 88%, while NHL 08 reached 86%. The majority of critics seemed to agree that the latest game in the series is a step up in many ways compared to its predecessors.

1up‘s Mike Nelson put it succinctly saying “if you thought NHL 09 was great, you’ll love ’10.” Destructoid‘s Samit Sarkar, meanwhile, lauded the 2010 edition as the best in the series. “NHL 10 is EA Sports’ best hockey title yet,” Sarkar explained, “offering considerably improved gameplay and another hour-eating mode in Be A GM.”

But while the majority of reviews featured near-universal praise, IGN‘s Nate Ahearn believed that not enough was done to differentiate the game from the version released last year. “NHL 10 is a great hockey game, don’t get me wrong,” Ahearn wrote. “The biggest problem that fans of the series will have is that it just isn’t all that different from NHL 09…Nothing is a bad or poor choice that even comes close to ruining the experience, but there could have been more done to expand the core gameplay and offering of modes.”

That being said, he did bestow upon the game a fairly high rating of 87/100.

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