NHL 18 is finally teaching me how to win

Sports simulation is a genre that I like in theory, but every time I pick up NHL or Madden, it’s like my knowledge of the sport doesn’t transfer at all to success in the video game version. But that has changed with NHL 18 because, for the first time, the tutorials and teaching systems are making me a better player.

NHL 18 is out now for $60 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. I’ve spent about as much time with it as I have with the rest of the NHL games this generation (EA has the only NHL sim left after 2K stopped making them in 2009), but it’s the first one that doesn’t feel like an exercise in trying to fit my head through a pinhole in a brick wall. The big change here is that EA Sports has refined its tutorial systems to improve onboarding. It starts right as you boot up the game, and the NHL 18 asks you some basic questions that determine how the game should control and play. I am familiar with the rules of the National Hockey League as well as the strategies, my problem is execution. And it essentially asked if that was the case and it set the difficulty to easy, the rules to simulation (with shortened periods), and the controls to the sticks (as opposed to the buttons). From there, I ran through some tutorial videos, and that’s where my learning experience normally would fall apart.