The crowd pounds the glass and the music thumps from the speakers. You slide up to the faceoff and tap your stick on the ice. The ref drops the puck, you quickly sweep it to the defenseman and take off up the ice. You're hit with a pinpoint pass on the blade of your stick as you cross the blue line. Swiftly, you maneuver to avoid a hard check from the defenseman — there's only you and the goalie left. You skate closer and closer, you deke left, right, and back to the left before ripping a powerful slapshot over the goalie's right shoulder. The puck hits the back of the net and the horn sounds as your teammates engulf you — this is NHL hockey at its finest.
Lace up the skates, tape up the stick and head out to the ice for hard-hitting, exciting action in NHL 2K11. Feel like you have full control of the stick on the ice with 2K Sports' Wii MotionPlus 2.0 control, which features real-time puck handling, dekes, poke checks and even juggling moves. Battle Miis in mini games, trivia challenges and skills competitions in the all-new Road to the Cup mode. NHL 2K11 delivers an authentic hockey experience on the Wii complete with broken sticks, more responsive skating, improved A.I. and more. With improved player models, redesigned arenas and highly detailed jerseys and equipment, NHL 2K11 shoots the best looking NHL 2K hockey game right into your living room.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
First of all, I really love sports video games, and among them, in my opinion, ice hockey is the best, the most fast paced adrenalin rushed sport video game of all.
I tried a few of the NHL franchise games from EA Sports in the past, back from Super NES days to XBOX, PS consoles more recently, but this is my first 2K Sports video game, and since there are no other hockey options for the wii, I decided to try this one, besides I guess I was too impatient to wait for the upcoming EA Sports NHL Slapshot.
That said, this game is definitely a good hockey game but with a few cons, among them:
The motion plus control thing in this game is really bad, specially when shooting, the B button pushing + remote shaking, makes me sick, nearly 70-80% of the shots I try using that combo, are never translated to an actual shot in the game, so I end up with no shot at all, without the puck, and in front of the goalie, it's very frustrating. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, or maybe I have to use the remote and nunchuk (R&N) combo as a pair of maracas and play some samba with it!, but at this point I gave up with the motion plus in here and ended up using the plain R&N combo with no motion plus at all. By the way, even though I think I'm a good video game player, and I usually beat most friends and family members I play against, my 8 year old nephew beats me at this game, maybe it's because he shakes the remote wildly indeed like a maraca, and the motion plus finally get its job done.
The user interface is not very efficient, you can get used to it but it's somewhat confusing at first. EA Sports games interfaces are definitely much better designed.
Playing against the computer is not fair at all so most of the times you'll lose, even in rookie difficulty, sometimes the other team scores so easily and you just have to sweat to score a single goal.
I don't know if my memory is betraying me but I think that all the players faces do not merely look the same, they are in fact the same face for everyone!
Finally, there are some moves that are virtually impossible to achieve in the heat of the game, for instance, juggling-the-puck-with-the-stick-in-the-air-and-shoot move, they're hard already to try them in the tutorial, so it's ridiculously difficult to do it during a regular game, so I don't bother even trying.
In conclusion, maybe I should have waited for NHL Slapshot to arrive, though it's fair to say it's not that bad overall, however, I've never considered buying a classic controller (Pro) for the Wii until now, I was doing fine with the usual R&N combo for most games so far, besides, what's the point of using the wii with a classic controller, in that case it's better to get an xbox 360 or PS3 for that matter, but I'm definitely going to try this game with that controller configuration to see how it works, in the meantime, while I wait for the controller to be delivered at my door, I guess I'm gonna keep losing scoring chances a lot from shots that never happened while sweating my way throughout some playoffs campaign.
