EA manages to secure its place as the best source for virtual hockey, especially given its exclusive use of the license.

NHL 15 recreates the feeling of being at a live game quite well. From licensed arenas to impressively detailed crowd modelings, there's little that's been left out from the experience of attending an NHL game. These details combine for some remarkable true-to-life instant replays, all complementing the complete NBC Sports presentation.

NHL 15 Ultimate Team coins introduce 12-player collision physics, which means the game calculates nonessential player collisions out of the play or even offscreen. Computer controlled players are now vulnerable to the elements because they're constantly being simulated in real time. This works for and against the general semblance of realism. There's nothing better than seeing two players knock into each other, only to open the perfect lane for a fast-break to the net. But there's also a decent amount of goofiness too, where players seem to stumble for no reason. In the end it all makes for a handful of questionable plays -- sequences that would likely merit a penalty call in reality -- but nevertheless go undisciplined.

Right away the power of the new consoles comes to the forefront. The increase in graphical quality is immediately noticeable on multiple levels. EA made a point of making the game look even better and as close to the real thing as possible, re-working many different aspects of how it all looks.

Take Be a GM mode for example. If I'm entering a mode where I am tasked with running an NHL 15 coins franchise, there are things I expect to control. Drafting players, consulting the AHL affiliate team for who is ready to come up, and more were all part of the fun in NHL 14, but NHL 15's GM mode loses all of them. The draft is CPU-automated, the up-and-coming players are merely waiting to come up, and I'm basically a figurehead, not a GM. I want to run a team, EA Sports, and you took some of the best parts about running a team away from me while assigning others to the A.I. What if I don't want the player the CPU drafts for me? What then?

Interestingly, cheap NHL 15 coins are missing a few things when playing a match. Pull off a miraculous hat trick, for example, and you get no hats flying in from the crowd. This also includes home wins in Detroit, where no cephalopods get hurled. The naming of the three stars at the end of each game is also omitted, something that seems odd considering how easy it would be to implement. It is coming in a patch, though.

Perhaps that’s why EA Sports’ NHL 15 feels so less-than in comparison to the publisher’s other annual sports sims. It’s a shame, really. The PlayStation 4/Xbox One version of the game – the first to be built using EA’s current-gen technology – is the strongest the series has been in years in terms of presentation and raw playability. But the treasure trove of features that defines so many EA Sports titles is dialed down here, to the point that NHL 15 might as well be a reboot.

And then there's NHL 15, a next-gen sports game that falls strangely short. Somehow it's been almost completely stripped down, robbed of the key features that made its predecessors so strong. The on-ice hockey game is solid, sure, but how long will you play that when the rest of the game's modes are totally lackluster?

NHL 15 on the older consoles still maintains a lengthy list of game modes and features that are nowhere to be seen on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions.

National Hockey League loyalists are used to getting their emotions tossed around, whether it be by frustrating TV deals, the way the sport gets swept under the rug by popular American culture, and the general lack of media attention and press it gets. They must endure these harsh realities, forever cursed in knowing their sport is secretly the best thing to ever happen to humanity.

Part of that tragedy was realized a little less than a year ago when we found out that the iconic NHL coins series would not be making an appearance on the brand-new NHL 15 Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. At the time we were told the team was focused on delivering the best-possible experience on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but the final product proved to be a step back.

Really, the one thing that may go the furthest toward tying together NHL 15's illusion of "this is real hockey" is the presentation. Featuring a commentary team of NBC Sports' Mike Emrick, Eddie Olczyk, and Ray Ferraro, fans would be hard-pressed to ask for a better line-up calling the game (except for you, everyone in Canada). The beginning of each match-up starts with a "live broadcast" that genuinely makes each game seem more important than it really is.

Again, the on-ice portion of NHL 15 Ultimate Team coins isn't really the issue. It's still the solid game of hockey it's been for a while, though it's arguably more the same solid game of hockey than it's been in a while. Meaningful advancements in gameplay just aren't there this year. The AI is strong, especially if you bump up the difficulty--you'll see teams react to repeated tactics and change up their play accordingly--and the feel of the game remains highly enjoyable, provided you're playing against a good competitor. And really, that's vital this year, because there aren't a lot of other ways to play NHL 15.

NHL 15 pucks are shell of its former self. Despite some impressive work to bring the on-ice experience and game presentation up to a new-generation level, it is so devoid of modes and features that its appeal will be limited to fans that have been waiting for hockey on their new machines; after all, NHL skipped the launch of the latest console generation last fall. While most other sports games have made the transition to the PS4 and Xbox One quite nicely, NHL finds itself in a very different position; at the bottom of the pile, looking up.

Fans of the franchise are upset with the disappearance of many of the game’s features.

When EA Sports first released photos and gameplay videos of NHL 15 pucks, the hockey world got excited at the improved graphics, physics, and AI. But since the game’s release, hockey fans have been furious about the laundry list of missing features. Is the game worth your time given all of the furor and rancor? It depends on how you prefer to play your virtual hockey.

The actual sporting section of cheap NHL 15 coins – the play of the puck itself – is great. Sure, playing the boards feels a little scripted still, but the improvements to puck physics, collisions, and goaltender reactions all make for an outstanding game of hockey. Scrambles around the goalmouth are about as frequent as they are in the real world NHL now, with not every goal being scored from by a big slapshot from the point or a wrister from a one-time pass, as was the case in years gone by. 

You need to work hard to score, as improved defensive reactions will cut out quite a few of your options when playing the AI and although those goalies concede goals in a more realistic manner now, they aren’t fools. They’ll put up a stone wall to kill off your beautiful breakaway move more often than not, and look great whilst doing it. Graphical improvements are in place of course, and everything looks sharp. Players are animated better and collide much more convincingly now, although they are somewhat more robotic than we’d like at times.

On the ice, you’ll notice the improved physics as soon as you start.  Each and every player is a physics-enabled object now, whereas last year, only two players who were colliding were affected.  Now, you can cause pile-ups in front of the net, and land devastating hits that can potentially cause one player to barrel into another.  The NHL 15 puck physics make a difference, as you’ll see goals that you’ve never seen before.  The game seems to run a bit smoother over last year; that is, the players seem less sluggish, everything seems a hair faster, and, well, players seem to be able to stop and change direction better.

EA created a time-intensive 9,000 unique fans to fill the stands’ lower bowls and dispel the franchise’s notion for plunking a bunch of generic-looking fans near the glass. It’s not just the number of super fans, however; it’s how they act. “We’ve got vendors walking up and down the aisles,” Ramjagsingh says. “And you’ll see people in the crowd taking selfies.”

Pacioretty, an Xbox guy, calls this season’s aesthetic leap one of the most impressive he’s seen from year to year. “One thing that really struck me was how real it all looked, and they had Doc and Eddie up there announcing,” he says. “I thought that was pretty cool as well.”

NHL 15: The camera change does an excellent job accentuating the experience of being a single person who needs to contribute to the team’s effort to produce a victory.

NHL 15's equally archaic "rock-paper-scissors" face-off system continues to employ the same tiny selection of predetermined win/lose animations. Some moves like the stick lift actually put the winning centerman's team at a disadvantage, due to how slow the animations are and how unrealistically quick the defense can explode out of their stances to intercept the NHL 15 Ultimate Team Coins or poke it free from the recipient. Face-off participants still cannot get ejected from the circle for drawing early, despite the fact that this rule is enforced at all levels of professional hockey.

Likewise, using real video imagery of Doc and Eddie against fake, in-game footage was jarring. It was cool to hear that music, see the same scoreboard graphics, and witness the intros to each city, with helicopter shots of the arenas, skylines, and other geography. But slow-mo recaps of goals and other memorable moments are ruined by sharp edits between scenes that have the action stop for split seconds at a time. The most awkward recaps of them all are for fights, when you see that gloves are dropped by both players in literally one or two frames. These scenes in particular look so weird and unrealistic.

Such cuts speak to the tyranny of the annual sports game development cycle. If cheap NHL 15 coins had been practically any other game, it would have been pushed back into 2015. But after what happened with NBA Live back in 2010, any kind of delay is basically a death sentence, and EA Canada knows it. Unfortunately, the alternative in this case is a half-finished game. I can't fault NHL 15's developers for focusing on getting the gameplay up to speed, but neither can I ignore the sheer amount of content that has been cut from this version. EA has announced extensive post-launch support for NHL 15, including the restoration of Online Team Play and the addition of a draft mode for Be a GM, which is a nice gesture.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first as I’m sure many of you have heard already that NHL 15 lacks in features. Upon starting up the game for myself, I initially had a head scratching moment as well. When looking at the menu screen for the first time, there’s only three tabs which right away signaled that there was stuff missing from NHL 15 coins for sell. Upon surfing through the menus, I spent a few minutes just searching for the Season Mode as that’s where I normally start with sports games to review them. Well, there isn’t one in NHL 15, not exactly, but we’ll get to that in a second. Other modes like Winter Classic, Online Team Player, GM Connected and more features are gone. Why? Well, only EA knows that.

Where “Be a Pro” stands out is in the actual gameplay. When gamers take the ice in the “Be a Pro” mode, the camera shifts from the standard top down view of the players, to a dynamic third person camera that circles and surrounds the character. The camera change does an excellent job accentuating the experience of being a single person who needs to contribute to the team’s effort to produce a victory.

NHL 15 benefits greatly from a complete overhaul in presentation, which the series has sorely needed for years.

Speaking of things remaining the same, no positive changes have been made to either NHL’s Be A Pro or Be A GM mode. The reason I say no positive changes is due to the fact that some features have been removed. For example, you can no longer manually draft players in Be A GM, a key part of your experience with the mode. This makes rebuilding a team more difficult than it would be otherwise. The lack of a manual draft is absolutely baffling in the grand scheme of things; it is something that makes you tilt your head and say “How could they ship the game without this feature that other sports games have possessed since the PS2?”

The General Manager Mode is underdeveloped, as well, missing the ability to draft players manually. The computer will decide for you who to draft every season, making things like scouting or planning your sports franchise's future completely moot. (Another thing EA has promised will be re-added.)

All of the missing modes mentioned above existed as part of NHL 14's launch-day feature set (in fact, these modes all exist in hut 15 coins for Xbox 360 and PS3, though they remain unchanged versus last year's game). It's not unreasonable for sports fans asked to spend $60 at launch to expect feature parity between a year old product and the latest to hit the market, especially since EA identified this as a concern for its Madden and FIFA franchises at the start of the PS4 and Xbox One generation.

For what it's worth, EA's patching some of these missing features back into NHL 15 Ultimate Team Coins. Already added are a playoff mode, coach feedback in Be a Pro, and the three stars of the game (how the latter was ever overlooked, I'll never know). Coming soon are online team play and the aforementioned ability to control the draft in Be a GM. That's the extent of the plans that EA has outlined thus far.

It's all such a shame because at its heart NHL 15 is a very solid hockey game. It just doesn't do any of the non-hockey stuff right. Honestly, newcomers to the franchise might not even notice. But, series veterans would feel incredibly cheated. If nothing else, this is a great foundation for EA Canada to build on as it gets more comfortable developing for Xbox One and PS4.

Again, all of the aforementioned missing features existed in last year's game. (They're also available in NHL 15 PS3 coins and Xbox 360, but they're essentially unchanged from NHL 14.) It seems reasonable for sports fans to expect, at the very least, feature parity with a year-old game — especially since EA managed to make that happen with Madden NFL 25 and FIFA 14 at the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One last fall. It's absolutely inexcusable that, nearly a year later, that's not the case with NHL 15.