NHL 27 has been in the hands of early access buyers for a few days now, and somehow nobody is talking about the gameplay. Instead, hockey Twitter has spent the week roasting EA Sports over just how wrong a good chunk of the player face scans turned out.
Given the graphical power of modern consoles, fans expected stars like Connor McDavid and John Tavares to look close to their real-life selves. Instead, a wave of screenshots comparing in-game models to actual photos went viral, and the results have ranged from mildly off to downright unrecognizable.
NHL 27 roasted
Nobody got it worse than Bruins forward Mason Lohrei, whose scan barely resembles a human being, let alone the player himself. Teammate Charlie McAvoy wasn’t far behind him, and Kirill Kaprizov, Alexander Ovechkin and Sharks forward Will Smith didn’t escape it either, with one side-by-side comparison of Smith’s scan racking up thousands of replies on its own. A few players, like Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, came out looking close to perfect, which only made the misses stand out more.
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Plenty of fans found the whole thing funny, but many also made a point of how embarrassing it is for a game of this size and budget to still be getting this wrong.
“None of these players are real. They can’t hurt you,” one fan joked.
“Zero shame from EA for releasing this. Good lord,” another wrote.
“They’re not even trying anymore, and people will still buy this crap. Please show at least a little self-respect and don’t spend your money on this,” a third added.
“My god this is horrid,” someone else simply put it.
NHL 27 officially releases on September 11 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. EA Sports has yet to publicly address the face scan issues or say whether a patch is coming.
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