'Thankfully, most of the modes are enjoyable enough once you wade through the myriad menus and actually dive into a match.' While I definitely delved into the game’s harder settings a bit, I settled on the second option after a few hours. If anything, the Rookie setting felt like a great amount of control while keeping things like poke and body checks a simple button press away.

The level of difficulty customization offered is above and beyond, and while I opted for the lowest setting to begin with, I never felt that the game was dumbing itself down. EA has succeeded admirably at offering accessibility for rookies and pros alike. My existing (albeit rudimentary) understanding of the sport helped me grasp the basics right away, and the excellent training setup gave me the rest of the information needed to fully invest in the game. Since I hadn’t played a game in the series since 2015, I booted up this iteration with the initial goal of finding the tutorials and learn from the ground up. I didn’t want to just slap a puck around willy-nilly while button-mashing after all. There’s so much to love about hockey, so when playing this year’s NHL 19, I was going in with a deep-seeded desire to expand my knowledge of the beloved sport and grow alongside my skater. Hockey has always been the latter for me. There are sports you really “get” and then there are sports you really want to “get”.

Nhl 19 ps4 review