Mutant League Hockey (Genesis/Mega Drive)

After Electronic Arts brought cartoonish and irreverent violence to American football with Mutant League Football for a solid yet silly sports game, it was easy to imagine them applying this formula to some other popular sport. Considering that hockey is already a raucous sport known for its embrace of body checking and frequent fights out on the ice, it’s little surprise that it would be the next game to embrace the bloodiness and blatant cheating that defines the Mutant League.

Mutant League Hockey carries over all of the regular rules of typical ice hockey and simply relaxes the ones that would prevent it from having its sci-fi sports league actively feature players dying on the ice. In an interesting choice, Mutant League Hockey has trimmed down the type of creatures it features from Mutant League Hockey, outright removing any true mutants and now having the available hockey teams comprised solely of skeletons, robots, and trolls. This does mean it’s fairly easy to slot them all into specialized roles though. The big burly trolls are the ones you want to be bullying other players or playing defensively, robots can zip around the ice quickly but can be smacked around rather easily, and the skeletons actually land in between the two in being able to take a hit better than robots and move faster than trolls despite not excelling in either department. Since you’ll only be controlling one player on the ice at a time you can’t always afford to be too strategic with which player type is moving around, but you can at least try to pick your team based on which monsters they feature and which ones suit your play style.

Your team pick in Mutant League Hockey is actually extremely important since every player you aren’t controlling at the moment will be handled by the AI. The 23 teams are all rated on a scale from 0 to 6 skulls to tell you how capable they are, and if you pick a 0 skull team like the Mighty Weenies or a 1 skull like The Shrimps then you can expect many shots to slips past your goalie while your AI controlled allies fail to position themselves well on offense or defense. Conversely, a 5 skull team like Pucksucker Pukes or even just a 3 skull choice like the St. Mucus Ooze will play much more competently, with less points given up and the players putting themselves in more strategic positions. You can definitely feel skull gaps between the two teams playing without it really feeling like either side is blatantly being favored, but being able to score more often and defend the net better means that beating better rated teams is definitely an uphill climb that will test your ability to overcome any deficiencies in your team composition.

Mutant League Hockey perhaps does an even better job than it predecessor at constantly embracing the comedic violence the series revolves around. Right from the face-off at the start of the game you’re encouraged to start slamming your fist into the other player’s face so you gain puck control, and after that you are free to whale on other skaters as you please during actual play. While punching is easy and quick it can’t be aimed diagonally so you can’t always wallop whoever has the puck to knock it free if they move intelligently. Thankfully the audience loves to see things get wild and are constantly throwing helpful items out onto the rink to up the bloodshed. Weapons are definitely the biggest game changers, these tools including things like chainsaws and flails that can extend your attack reach and deal a lot more damage to opposing players. Having a robot run rampant with a chainsaw can lead to tons of deaths out on the ice, and when many skaters have weapons, you can expect a rink filled with the corpses of the fallen. You are free to customize how easy it is for players to get injured and die, but unlike Mutant League Football where lost players truly feel like a detriment to your team composition, the interchangeable nature of your players means playing with the injuries set to higher numbers can allow for chaotic matches where it can be a viable tactic to overcome a point deficit just by killing the other team outright.

Other items that can end up on the ice are a bit tamer than the weapons. Bones can be grabbed up to alter stats that don’t feel like they have too big of an effect on proceedings, and the coins actually go towards bribing referees to call more penalties on the other team. However, playing with penalties off almost seems to be the better option so that you can go wild with the hyper violent play style the game clearly was built around. Similarly, while you can set how long a game’s three periods last between three options, having them be three minutes long feels incredibly short because the game moves at such a quick pace. Even at its max of eight minutes you might find the game wrapping up surprisingly quick because of how you’ll be actively involved in the exchange of the puck and the frequent shots on goal. It’s always nice to have more options of course, and the game’s overall quick pace might be one reason there is a longer version of the single-player playoffs tournament where teams need two wins to proceed instead of just one.

Whatever settings you choose for single player or competitive multiplayer, another factor to consider is the state of the stadium. All but one of the rinks have some sort of hazard that can add a bit more danger to a game already chocked full of deadly tools at your disposal. Skaters might find themselves falling through thin ice or even needing to leap over preexisting holes, sharks somehow tear through the ice with their fins as tripping hazards, and some unlucky players might even be rammed into the spikes affixed to the arena walls. Even the goals sometimes have spikes on them that prick your players if they get too close, and teams can even swap in Demon Nets that have no goalie defending them but open and close their mouths to make it difficult to find your opening to score.

Another bit of chaos to add to a game already packed with opportunities to turn hockey into a true blood sport are the Nasty Plays, but these actually don’t feel as key to the experience as they were in Mutant League Football. An exploding puck can blow apart a player, confusion will change the opposing team’s controls for a bit, and Armed Force will get a bunch of weapons into the hands of your players, but these small advantages won’t really turn the tides like they do in a play-focused game like football. In Mutant League Hockey these still benefit you, and ones like killing the opposing goalie can have short term benefits if you can manage to slip the puck in during the attack, but there’s already enough action and brutality built into the basic play that these feel more like an additional bit of flavor rather than something you even really need to succeed.

Perhaps one of the most disappointing parts of Mutant League Hockey though is how it handles the actual straight up fights. A bout of fisticuffs on the ice feels comparatively tame to the kind of violence you’re allowed to enact during normal play, but sometimes the game triggers a small minigame where a player from each side participates in a fairly boring skirmish. You can punch, guard, and move forward or back in a little punch up viewed from the side, the only strategy really being to move in or back up to avoid or land strikes. When the fight is over though, the outcome determines the penalties applied, the winner getting off easier than the loser. Penalties, even when on, feel like a slap on the wrist compared to outright player loss, and with some Special Plays like busting penalized players out of the box to play, the outcome of these slow fights feels even less important. It feels almost like it was present since people would expect some actual fist fighting in a hockey title rather than any creativity being poured into it, which is a shame since the rest of the game has a lot of attention paid to fun details. You may get big reactive characters in the fist fights, but it’s much more fun to see players celebrate goals with quirky dances, grotesque coaches give backhanded compliments, or Glynda the zamboni monster move across the ice to gobble up player parts as she clean things up.

Something more pressing of an issue than tepid fist fights though is that the ice hockey controls aren’t fully there. You can swap the player you’re controlling and the game usually picks someone closer to the puck then the one you’re playing as and there are two different shot types so you can value control or power when aiming for a goal, but other elements of the controls don’t feel tight enough. Passing to another player is sometimes a matter of faith since the screen doesn’t show too much of the ice, so the fact the AI player you’re aiming for sometimes skates away blissfully unaware he was targeted doesn’t help with keeping play fluid. You can learn to pass when it’s clearly safe or just hold onto the puck as best as you can, but the problems with goalies continue to bog down the otherwise sound hockey mechanics. Goalies are best controlled by the AI where sometimes they might almost be too capable, but you can eventually find attack angles to slip by them or start to realize when it is a good time to shoot on goal. However, if the action is near your net and you’re trying to swap players, woe betides you if you end up in control of your goalie. Actually defending the net as a human is simple but much easier to exploit, and when I’d play a demonstrably weaker team, the only time they scored on me was because I accidentally ended up controlling my goalie and losing that artificial edge he would have if he was still in the computer’s hands.

Perhaps more of a problem though is when your goalie grabs the puck successfully and tries to put it back into play. If you pass it to one of your players and either that player runs away from it or it is intercepted, you’re still in control of your goalie and the AI knows how to slip past human players with ease. A simple change to have you control who you are passing to would fix much of the issues with both goalie control and the passing problems mentioned earlier, but instead you can lose puck control or points simply because of the way things are now. The control of your team isn’t quite there to make the core hockey fundamentals work as well as they need to, but they are also not so disastrous they destroy the experience. This is definitely one reason you’ll want to embrace the Mutant League elements though, because if played as a more vanilla hockey game with few injuries, frequent penalties, and the hazard free arena, it ends up a bit of a rough experience.

THE VERDICT: Thanks to some issues with goalie strength and control on top of some rough passing, Mutant League Hockey isn’t fully there when it comes to its hockey core, but the absurd violence is an extra spice added to help keep things quick and enjoyably chaotic. The actual fights are a bland break from the action, but on the ice, whipping people with weapons to try and outright kill the enemy team keeps things frantic and involved. Games go by quickly even on higher settings because of the game’s swift pace, and the character and humor thrown on top of all the bloodshed makes this a game that’s easy to appreciate for its irreverent personality even if the actual sport you’re playing could use some refinements.

And so, I give Mutant League Hockey for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

An OKAY rating. Compared to Mutant League Football, this game does the Mutant League elements better but the sport worse. The hockey is unfortunately rough around the edges with how much the course of play is determined by your AI cooperating with you and how dangerous it is to even control your goalie, but it is still possible to look past the annoyances these unpolished play mechanics cause because the rest of the action is snappy and gloriously gory. The first time you watch one of your troll players decapitate himself to celebrate a point only to slap it back on during his dance really nails in how silly the game’s violent nature truly is, and as the ice is filled with weapons and bodies you really start to feel like the bloody battles are almost as important as the point scoring. The fact this can be reined in some by a less lenient penalty system feels like it’s almost missing the point of the game and it certainly feels much less exciting to play with that option on. The hockey isn’t solid enough to carry the experience on its own so it needs all that glorious cartoonish violence and the extra level of personality to the affair to still keep the player interested and involved, and while it would be a sort of shoddy hockey game without them, the missteps aren’t so overpowering that you can keep you from having fun with this decent sport title.

Mutant League Hockey was unfortunately the second and final of EA’s attempts to spice up their sports games with cartoon bloodshed, meaning we never got to see how chaotic and silly something like basketball or baseball could get with this formula. A game confusingly called Mutant Football League instead of Mutant League Football came out in 2018 to revive the concept, but it’s possible that Mutant League Hockey’s prioritization of presentation over ensuring it has the solid foundation on top of it that might have turned interest away from this series’s concept. There’s always the consideration though that football and hockey are the two most inherently violent professional sports beyond ones that are straight up fights already like boxing, so perhaps other alternatives aren’t as natural a fit for the concept. Whatever the reasoning, Mutant League Hockey does at least do its aesthetic justice even if it couldn’t perfectly nail the basics of hockey play.