NHL 26 Comments – IGN
Blog Andrew Joseph 13 Sep , 2025 0
It may not have a soccer, baseball or soccer audience, but for proud fans, there is something special about hockey. It's the cold air of the arena, the weight of the puck and the weight of the stick and the feeling of the skateboard slid across the surface of the ice. To their credit, the developers at EA Vancouver seem to get all of this, which makes them create a pleasant NHL simulation that earns an dedicated audience. However, this dedication has been increasingly tested in recent years as the series fails to really move forward in any meaningful way. EA Sports NHL 26 continues this dynamic with a game that nails most elements that make hockey unique, but never like the important jumps that used to be, which could make another version of the purchase exciting rather than compulsory.
If you've played EA's hockey game at any time in the past few years, you have a good idea of what you'd expect from NHL 26. The series' Lynchpin is a franchise model, which allows you to choose your own choice in the season's Quest of Shoune Quine te Shoist the Stanley Cup. Basically, this is the default mode, showing the most famous content of the series and still doing well. Single games are fast, controls are intuitive, and Ea Vancouver has spent years perfecting the formula for most work. Admittedly, there are few other hockey games right now, and there are no official NHL players or teams that do exist. Lack of competition can lead developers to play so safely and keep so much unchanged. To be fair, it's hard to blame them too much for them because they don't repair something that doesn't break.
However, this situation created an unfortunate trend for the series, making the annual version like the baby’s steps, while the NHL 26 continues to focus on smaller tweaks rather than making substantial changes. As a result, it's easy to miss not only reflect the adjustments to the large roster we've seen during the offseason, for example, Mitch Marner was on the Golden Knights after leaving the Leaf, while Matt Dumba showed up on the Penguins after her departure in Dallas. At the time of writing, EA Vancouver seems to have done a good job making sure everything is up to date, including representing the Utah Mammoth with a new name, uniform and arena (after the makeshift “Utah Hockey Club” tag next season). Finally, the PWHL has been updated to add two new teams to the Women's League for the 2025-2026 season, although this pattern seems to be completely unchanged.
While the franchise mode seems to be the most popular single player mode in EA's NHL game of the year, I really like the customization options and the general way to sports found in narrow focus aaa Pro. It’s really real to play hockey as a grown man and it’s focused on controlling individual players. It is also necessary to consider line changes, playback position and set CPU-controlled characters.
So, I'm glad to find some bigger changes here this year, but I've found that they're not all positive. Some of the biggest improvements come from cutting things that haven't worked yet: NHL 26 finally dropped the often-played and often-repeated “expensive pond hockey” opening scenes that appear in multiple games. You will no longer see the same repeating movie sequence with an agent, talking about your passion for hockey, that you are playing the pond with a bunch of kids. Instead, you go straight to the player maker. Kindly, EA also scaled back the frequent coaching sessions of the past, a career model, but grabbing that the replacement could be more monotonous: press conferences.
The idea of attending a press conference is actually neat and the initial questions help shape your on-ice personality. Hockey Press will ask questions like your approach so that free agency, choosing one option will improve your loveliness with teammates, while another option can help your brand. But once you participate in the execution several times in a row, the execution becomes stupid. It might be a little too real: I attended a real-life NHL press conference, and the sports journalist’s questions can really be as compelling as they are here at times. How do I feel about not winning the department? What do you think?
Most importantly, the impact of a press conference on player statistics is often unfair. At a press conference, I was asked about modeling my career around specific players, and there are a variety of options to choose from. I obviously chose the wrong one, which immediately resulted in a decrease in my brand statistics. Worse, NHL 26 isn't always clear about which answers will negatively affect your brand or management feel, so seemingly harmless reactions can have unforeseen consequences.
However, wise changes make the NHL's most intimidating pattern easier to get closer to me. Composing a team of NHL greats from the Ultimate Team of Hockey (HUT) takes a lot of time and effort. While the daily freebies you get can help shape a decent team without paying extra, it may also require some real currency. Still, I don’t have to take my team to compete with enthusiastic players who dominate online with skill and big wallets. Sometimes you want to play without the pressure to compete with real people. So it's a welcome change, and for NHL 26, the EA replaced last year's small squad battle with a new offline cup chase mode that offers the opportunity to build a team and try in a full single player game with multiple hard levels. I'm glad to have the opportunity to jump into the game with my custom team without having to worry about going to school by people who are strongly protected by their online rankings. Anyone who wants to do this can be in the cabin as usual as they are online.
However, when online or closed, the NHL feels increasingly behind the Sports Game Pack of the Year in a graphical way. Despite the fact that last year, NHL 25 marked the first game in the series, abandoning PS4 and Xbox One and shifting the focus to the current platform. But the NHL 26 still doesn't feel that it really pushes the PS5 and Xbox series X|s to the biggest position. The ice itself pops up the screen nicely and has a lot of impressive details, including wear on the surface as the game progresses, but almost all else is disappointing. The character model is rough and usually looks ugly relative to what we see in other recent sports games. There are also some weird choices and oversights that are reserved in past games, such as the team logo being cut off on a specific screen. Past crowd reactions are also stuck, with awkward celebrations right at home on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.
Thankfully, I found the audio more pleasant. The menu has some great new songs this year, including tracks from groups like Wet Legs and Beehives. I never thought “Catch These Fists” was a hockey song, but it was undeniably perfect. In the game itself, EA Vancouver continues to replicate the true sound of each rink with team-specific cheers and organ sounds. The reviews are also very loyal to current NHL viewing experience. It feels like watching a nationally televised game, offering the same chatty you'd expect to hear on TNT. That said, I'm glad to switch it when choosing to repeat.
However, the worst audio in NHL 26 belongs to the McLean celebration. It is possible to hear the San Jose Sharks advance to become a career mode to provide career advice, and it is obvious that not all hockey players have been cut off their performances.