The two-year rule still applies.
I sat down to write this review with the realisation that I’ve been reviewing EA Sports’ NHL franchise for 15 years now. Re-reading some of my reviews, I couldn’t help but laugh at the general advice I always seem to give: you probably don’t need to buy new iterations of the franchise each and every year; one every two years should sort you. In later years, that’s been adapted to exercising some patience and waiting until this or last year’s version eventually makes its way to PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass.
It should come as no surprise then that this is how I feel about NHL 26. It’s extremely similar to NHL 25 — a game I quite enjoyed — that does better in some areas, and worse in others. Your appetite for hockey will really dictate if this one ends up in your shopping cart.
Hockey Ultimate Team
While EA Vancouver talked up systems like ICE-Q 2.0, it has again placed a majority of its focus on Hockey Ultimate Team. Of the developer’s deep dive videos, Be A Pro came in at 3 minutes, gameplay at 5 minutes, and Ultimate Team equalling both those together at 8 minutes.
The biggest change to NHL‘s card-hungry spend-em-up comes in the form of Cup Chase, a mini-league of sorts that’ll place your Ultimate Team up against the likes of others. Competing with salary caps and your own card pulls — so, dependent on whether or not you want to play-to-earn new cards or simply open up your wallet to try for some heavy hitters — you can play online or offline, set difficulty levels, and play through a shortened season of 18 games hoping to hit the playoffs. Then, four teams will go at it in best-of-three series, hoping to win the league altogether; rewards, naturally, follow based on your success.
“I am not a big fan of EA’s decision to nickel-and-dime customers with a variety of different microtransactions in the game,” I said of NHL 11 back in 20-bloody-10, the first time the mode featured in the game, and that thought remains today. I actually enjoyed Cup Chase quite a bit, but then recoiled in horror as I realised I was playing more games to chase down objectives and card packs… and knowing myself, could guarantee that would mean a team OVR obsession that would certainly make me use real world money to make numbers go up.
Not wanting to let the many-eyeballed octopus that is Ultimate Team burrow into my soul and control my bank account, I stopped playing that mode and backed out of HUT altogether. Psychologists — and Alien Earth fans — will likely facepalm at the way I’ve just described things, but the fact still remains: the mode could quickly and easily be responsible for many unhealthy and wallet-destroying acts.
Be A Pro
One thing is clear reading through 15 years of reviews: Be A Pro is where I generally live. It’s also been the source of many highs, and just as many lows. In the past, as evidenced in my NHL 12 review, I revelled in starting out in the WHL, playing for my hometown Saskatoon Blades (and following in the footsteps of my real life uncle Wayne and his son, my cousin, Kirk). Where they have succeeded in reality, I do virtually.
That all fell away in NHL 21, with a revamped mode that promised to match the heights of narrative experiences found in FIFA and NBA 2K at the time… and, following years of copy/pastes that since have been waved away — and have been acknowledged by EA Vancouver as such — as “pricey pond hockey”. Things are different this time around, but not in the ways I’d like.
First, the World Juniors have been shoehorned into Be A Pro in what’s frankly the laziest way possible. You play two games at most before being thrown into the post-21 system of either the NHL or a couple rounds of the Champions League. EA couldn’t even be bothered to change the associated Trophy or Achievement to match the World Juniors win rather than the CHL one.
NHL 26 has a crazy emphasis on X-Factor abilities — so much so that in my standard Alumni All-Stars versus Japan for the goalie Trophy or Achievement, my screen was constantly (and annoyingly) lit up with all the X-Factors the likes of Gretzky, Howe, Lidström, and Howe were employing — that my absolute rookie Be A Pro character could unlock three X-Factors while still slumming it in the CHL. Talk about power creep.
At the same time, my Canadian-born character was getting phone calls from Macklin Celebrini — and no, his monotone voiceovers never get any better — as if we were the best of friends. I somehow didn’t even make the championship-winning photo for Team Canada… and, I think, neither did he. Celebrini’s voice acting isn’t unique, as so many voiceovers in new Be A Pro presentations are just flat out bad. They’re also fairly incestuous — you can clearly hear the Threes commentator pulling double duty as a member of the press.
The narrative around Be A Pro is all over the shop too. Having received many calls from Celebrini, I assumed he’d ring the first time my Edmonton Oilers faced off against his San Jose Sharks. He did not. He should have. It would have been kind of cool.
Instead, I got a call from my agent — whilst on the third line of the Oilers and barely hitting any ice time — to obtain three assists (ASSISTS! Not even points!) in my next game in order to secure a licensing deal. I moved away from a quick game to a longer one in order to be on the ice and actually accomplish this, only to be told after the game that the deal fell though. Here, success meant failure, and I was left wondering why.
I also quickly realised that simming a game equals instant failure within this new Be A Pro. Simming a game will almost always certainly lead you to fail a chapter, and in some instances will put you down to the farm team supporting your big league franchise; that means I can’t even take advantage of this functionality to go and play for my beloved Saskatoon Blades. In one instance, I went from a 100% success rate to a 9% because I simmed one game; frustratingly, this was also after already obtaining 200% more points than needed in that specific chapter. That’s just cruel.
On that note, the Be A Pro hub is wholly focused on you. It’s always “Wright and the Oilers” as if you’re a McDavid level player. Or a Draisaitl, or Hyman, or Ekkholm, or Nugent-Hopkins, or even a Nurse. I’m a bloody rookie. C’mon.
Gameplay
First, let it be known: EA graciously provided me pre-release code (unlike NHL 18), so I had extreme difficulties jumping into World of CHEL and finding any online games.
AI is largely unchanged, despite the hype around ICE-Q 2.0. In fact, I think it’s actually a bit worse — I’ve found myself screaming at the TV when my teammates won’t actually cycle or make way when I’m going for what’s clearly a free lane on the ice. Similarly, big enhancements that 2.0 was said to provide don’t seem so. Did Draisaitl get into his usual one-timer position as per hyped-up stats… or is that just a logical place to position a player for a one-timer?
Curiously, on PS5 Pro, commentary in this pre-release window was noticeably delayed — I first realised this during a goal that was waived off. Is the PS5 Pro moving a little too fast for its programming to keep up?
Hockey is family. Hockey is life. Hockey is a source of joy. NHL 26, less so. For all the good it does, this is an off year; this is certainly no NHL 17. I hoped for more.
NHL 26 heads to Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PS5 from 13 September. You can pay for a pricier Digital Deluxe Edition of the title that provides early access (and more Tkachuks on the cover) from 6 September, otherwise known as right now.
NHL 26 was reviewed using a promotional code on PS5 Pro and PS5, as provided by the publisher — who has provided such code for the better part of 15 years, with our thanks. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.
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NHL 2612 September 2025PS5 Xbox Series S & X
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