REVIEW: ‘EA Sports NHL 27’ Is Skating On Thin, Stale Ice

If you’ve played an NHL title from EA Sports in the past several years or so, you’ve played them all. Sure, NHL 27 adds a multiplayer connected franchise mode, and we’ve seen additions like World of CHEL, Ones, Pro-Am, and single-player options in Ultimate Teams over the years. NHL 26 brought the league’s EDGE stats into the game for more accurate player makeups after several years of Superstar X-Factors trying to differentiate players’ strengths and weaknesses.

The unfortunate reality in NHL 27 is that none of these slow improvements feel like they’ve made much of a difference in the end. The game remains as laborious to play casually and as brutal to play competitively as ever.

The skaters and teams don’t seem different enough from one another to match the emphasis put on the ways they’re supposed to be, even with a new “playbook” system that’s meant to have teams’ play styles more closely match their real-life counterparts. Plus, this year, a difficulty spike seems to be making even the lower difficulty modes harder to succeed in than I’m used to.

I have been a casual NHL player for well over a decade. In fact, my NHL journey started with NHL 99 back in the Nintendo 64 days. The franchise, its game modes, and its commitment to accurately representing the wide world of hockey have always been admirable. I’ve put hundreds of hours into Be a Pro characters, online Threes tournaments, and futile attempts to learn how to stickhandle properly.

NHL 27 doesn’t improve the series’ quality-of-life issues while adding new frustrations.

For me, NHL games have always been a casual experience. I sim through half a season at a time on low difficulties because there’s no way to justify playing a full 82 games plus playoffs, over and over again. I am grateful for single-player options in HUT, or the matchmaking options in World of CHEL, because I have never found success competing against strangers online or having a regular group of people to play EASHL with. It’s what’s made NHL 27 so disappointing.

NHL 27 feels like it resolves none of my usual qualms with NHL games while exacerbating others. When I first booted up Be a Pro mode, I was feeling good. I had a nice initial match trying out the World Juniors. Things were feeling tight in the gameplay.

I hit a nice one-timer, a skill I’ve tended to struggle with in the past. But then came game two. Halfway through the match, my player was injured. And for what felt like forever, I had to wait for him to sit there writhing in pain on the ice until a whistle blew and the play was dead.

It wasn’t a huge deal. I simmed through the rest of the game; he was fine the next day, and I didn’t have to miss any more games. But the amount of time it took for the play to end was ridiculous for a video game experience. I turn on a game to play and have fun, not watch my player bang his foot up and down in pain. Then the rest of the game was plagued by long load times, as it was in many future games.

The game moves way too slowly with replays and dead time between whistles and puck drops.

The replay packages between periods are exasperating; the time between the whistle blowing and the puck dropping again is forever, and it just always feels like I’m waiting an eternity for the game to start again after stopping every few seconds. The flow of the game is just much too slow and drawn out.

I wouldn’t be as bothered by these little things as I am, perhaps, if I felt like the time spent actually playing was any fun. Passes rarely feel like they are going where I intend for them to, and when they do, my players miss the puck most of the time anyway. Defense feels tighter than it often has, where my success rate on poke checking or body checking is much higher than in some recent NHL iterations.

But my ability to actually score goals has dropped dramatically in NHL 27. Yes, I’m sure it’s a skill issue, in part. But as somebody who has played these games fairly consistently for as long as I have, I’d like to think my success rate would be at least a little bit higher.

The same old modes feel tired, and the gameplay feels ornery.

The difficulty level just feels greater. I am scored against more often on lower difficulties than I’m used to. It doesn’t help, though, that some of the most interesting and dynamic modes purposefully make you play with low-skill players, and it shows. In Be a Pro, the upped difficulty only makes it that much harder to be a low-rated player fighting in a sea of professionals.

At least in HUT, when your players are all in the mid-70s, you can play against similarly skilled teams. But it still means that unless you spend large sums of real money, you’ll be stuck playing with worse players than if you played in other modes. The connected franchise option provides a way to play competitively against full-scale professional teams. An 82-game season just might be harder to schedule with friends than the joint seasons we’ve seen in Madden recently.

I cannot attest at all to how more seasoned or competitive NHL players will react to NHL 27. And if you’ve never picked one up or haven’t upgraded in several years, you can’t really go wrong here. It’s not all that different from its predecessors.

But for casual players like myself, the quality of life isn’t particularly high. The same old modes feel tired, and the gameplay feels ornery. I have yet to hit a successful one-timer since my first one. Even still, it always feels satisfying to eventually score a goal.

NHL 27 is available on September 11, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.