NHL Blades of Steel 2000, Konami's latest hockey game, shows a lot of promise right off the top. The game starts with the requisite highlight reel intro, which features a long procession of electrifying plays to get players ready for a hard-hitting, fast-skating game of hockey. After setting up a game, you're treated to a neat little loading screen that uses your players' mug shots instead of the usual loading bar. And once you get into the game, you see graphics that no one would call exactly eye-catching, but move at a smooth, fluid clip. So far, so good, but after playing for a while, you'll probably find yourself asking what the heck went wrong.

Things don't look too bad at first glance. A few odd behaviors, such as defenders who use flip passes to pass the puck to one another (surprisingly accurate!) and the puck's tendency to pop about a foot in the air when a skater loses control of it, don't really dampen thoughts that this is a game with potential. However, a few periods of play likely will. The most annoying gameplay "feature" is what I can only chalk up to clutching and grabbing. While this is part of today's NHL game, it is not well-represented in Blades of Steel, where a skater will often be stopped dead in his tracks when he touches a defender, without any animation to suggest he's being held, hooked or anything else. At one point, one of my players stood still while the defender next to him took four or five whacks at the puck, finally taking it away. I can't recall ever seeing a similar spectacle on open ice in all my years of watching professional hockey. I have no problem with a player losing the puck when it seems legitimate...but the game screen only shows two players standing next to one another, and one is inexplicably unable to move. "Oh, I insist! Take the puck. It wouldn't be fair if we didn't all get a turn."

Goaltending is another area of concern. Konami has wisely given gamers the option of setting goalie difficulty independently of AI difficulty.  But even on the hardest level, the goalies tend to let in weak looking shots that seem to pass right through their bodies (something that's hard to confirm with the game's shoddy replay feature). To add to the frustration are players who seem to have difficulty understanding how to stay onside, passes that don't go where they're intended and players who flip the puck even when you're almost certain you didn't press that button.

Aside from the annoying unintentional flips and bad passing, the control is OK, but it could have been a lot better. Players will often lose momentum if they change direction too quickly, which is a serious pain on breakaways when you try to deke the goalie. The manual also neglects to tell you how to win face-offs, so until you learn, expect to lose the face-off duels 20-25 times a game until you figure things out.

Player models won't win any awards for their artistic excellence. These players are perhaps the ugliest in any of this year's hockey titles. The ice surface, as well, is not exactly pretty, with faded out markings that belong in a community arena, not the home of an NHL team. But despite these problems, Blades of Steel has two things going for it in spades: a silky smooth frame rate and a look that is quite clean overall. This is an area where EA and Fox Interactive might want to take note - while the player models aren't nearly as detailed, the game would be much more pleasant to watch if the players were animated properly.   The majority of the animation is mediocre at best, but it would have been passable without missing animations, such as the holding problem mentioned earlier.

The sound effects are OK, but again not showstoppers. A bit of extra attention could have been paid to arena sounds like the buzzer at the end of the period. The crowd, however, is suitably loud, and the commentary, while a little stunted, is not too bad.

Konami has produced a hockey game that fails to follow up on its promising first impression. With every game, I found myself looking less and less forward to the drop of the puck. What we've got here is a very shallow hockey experience. With a few years of spit and polish, Konami could put together a hockey game that inspires people the way the original Blades of Steel once did. But if the company isn't willing to make that effort, perhaps mothballing the name and putting more focus into their contemporary titles would better serve them.