There’s a depressing moment while playing NHL 2K6 – it could be half-an-hour in, it could be a few hours in, no one’s really taking note of the time – when the horrible truth hits you. And it doesn't just hit you, it smacks you right in the face. It’s somewhere between the made-from-three-polygons Detroit Red Wings fan dancing around in the crowd to your hockey stick clipping through the net that you realise this isn’t the next-gen game that it’s cracked up to be. This is followed by a harrowing, hollow emptiness matched only by seeing your own reflection first thing in the morning. How depressing.

We’re not going to lie – it hurts. Having seen FIFA 06 and NBA Live 06 promise much and deliver more, it’s not rude to expect sports games to do more than go about their business on auto-pilot. Yet unfortunately, NHL 2K6 is on cruise control from the moment you first skate onto the ice rink right through to the moment your player awkwardly stumbles off it, as the developer joins the dots and does what’s expected without ever making this game of hockey look or feel spectacular. Even its stablemate, NBA 2K6, looked good enough and tickled your sporting fancy in the right places. So what happened here then? Well… nothing. That’s precisely the point. It’s what didn’t happen that’s the problem.

Just one glance at NHL 2K6 and you’re already off on the wrong foot. The only visual flourish comes from the skating lines carved up as everyone chases the puck, with everything else looking basic and undernourished. Pucks randomly warp around the player to fit his animation, players clip through each other and the crowd looks like a child has cobbled them together out of cardboard boxes. For the uninitiated: this doesn’t actually happen in ice hockey. It’s as though 2K Sports spent all its time crafting the beauty behind NBA 2K6 and knocked this out during a free lunch hour. “The ice is reflective!” will inevitably be 2K Sports’ fallback claim. While this is true, the ice also looks quite greasy, which presumably wasn’t the intended effect. Calling NHL 2K6 an Xbox 1.5 game is doing a disservice to the Xbox.

Having established that this doesn’t look next-gen, you’ll realise that it doesn’t play next-gen either. The passing and shooting is solid, allowing you to clip the puck around the rink and shoot with reasonable control over what’s happening. This is known as square one because this is something every hockey game manages to get right – after all, no one praises football games for providing pass and shoot buttons – and so there has to be something more on offer. However, this is where NHL 2K6 falls completely flat.

In trying to provide extra layers of depth beyond occasionally stabbing two face buttons, the advanced controls will tie your fingers into knots and make you cry horrible, salty tears of pain. You can coach on the fly by tapping the D-pad but you never get time to do so, thanks to NHL 2K6 deciding you can only give offensive team commands when you hit the final third of the rink. Weird. Likewise, the shoulder-plus-face-button combinations prove awkward and you’ll end up leaving them behind simply because it’s easier to concentrate on the simple commands. Each fumbled, mangled attempt at setting up advanced plays that see you lose the puck means you don’t want to try them anymore. The end result is ice hockey distilled to its purest form – passing and shooting. Back to square one.

There are further niggles that grate. The menus are horribly convoluted and make trading, changing your squad and even playing games during a season a real chore. Fights are a rare event and it’s easy to see why – two players slapping at each other with woeful collision detection is only matched by two boozed-up cavemen outside a pub. Worse still, fans will notice inaccuracies all over the place. Adam Deadmarsh is a white player, so why is he black in the game? Why are most of the names missing from the classic teams, such as ’75 Buffalo Sabres? Not the sort of thing your average Xbox 360 gamer will notice but the ice hockey fans who will buy this in their droves will.

NHL 2K6 isn’t that bad though. It plays a solid game of hockey that won’t offend you and proves just about entertaining enough in multiplayer, but it won’t please you either. It’s not offensive, but it’s not engaging. You’ll play through it with a numb, vacant glare on your face while wondering what else you could be doing with your spare time. Playing NBA 2K6, perhaps?

Ryan King