2K Sports’ NHL 2K9 for the Xbox 360 is a rather ho-hum update to the annual professional hockey franchise. The game still lacks the cinematic flair experimented with in NHL 2K7 but went missing in action in last year’s NHL 2K8. While rosters have been updates, there are actually not that many noticeable tweaks between last year’s release and this edition of the game.

The hockey game, developed by Visual Concepts, does play host to some changes, however. Most notable is the new commentary team, made up of Randy Hahn, Drew Remenda, and John Shrader of the San Jose Sharks broadcast team. While this freshens up the commentary with new voices, they are too often stuck with the same too-brief script of tired clichés that the last commentary team used, limiting the appeal of the new voices behind the lines.

There are also some notable upgrades, including new stick handling moves, more superstar moves added to the list from 2K8, enhanced skating engine, enhanced checking, brand new fighting engine, hit by puck collisions, blocked shots, user-controlled Stanley Cup celebrations, playoff beards and more than 1,400 new gameplay animations. But it’s all just window dressing on a package that, in the end, is still more vanilla than it is rocky road.

The heartbeat of any pro hockey game is its franchise mode, and unfortunately, there have been some troubles with NHL 2K9 in that regard; it seems that some users have discovered that if they play through more than a couple months of the franchise mode in one sitting, the game has a tendency to freeze up and result in lost data.

Also, if one manually saves their franchise immediately after a game-controlled auto-save, some users have reported that their save file gets self-deleted by the game. Although these problems are said to be limited and rare in scope by 2K Sports, they can occur and certainly become a problem for those who experience them. So far, in my testing, I have not been able to duplicate these errors.

The skating physics are improved from last year’s model, and the feel of the game is solid. Once you learn the controls, it is possible to be competitive in most of the games you play, though the AI is smart enough to win some from you even if you’re a series veteran, especially on the higher difficulty settings where the game physics and AI amp up and start playing as smart as you, and allowing fewer flukey goals.

Still, there’s really not much new in the way of expanding the appeal and features found in franchise mode, and the online play options are pretty much the same as before. When you combine this relative lack of real change or improvement to the series, along with the annoying lack of the cinematic presentation flair on display in 2K7 but since abandoned, there’s not much to really recommend this year’s model. If you desire up-to-date rosters, this is a serviceable entry in the series, but those who loved the 2K7 version won’t find a suitable replacement in this year’s model.