NHL 27: The Canadiens’ player faces look terrible

Félix Forget
NHL 27: The Canadiens’ player faces look terrible
Credit: Capture d'écran/Twitter

NHL 27, the latest installment in the annual series developed by EA Sports, will officially be released next Friday. But in reality, the game has been available since yesterday for those who pre-ordered the premium edition.

As a result, screenshots have been surfacing since yesterday… and not all of them are positive.

The player faces, for example, are causing quite a stir. EA Sports is increasingly trying to scan players to integrate their faces directly into the game.

Except that the results, so far, aren't exactly convincing. And it's obvious when you look at the Canadiens' players.

It's not necessarily obvious when you look at the team's top four forwards. They aren't perfectly rendered and look a little odd, but it's not that bad. And if you think it is, wait until you see the others.

Things get a little worse when you look more closely at the players who aren't superstars. And when you look at the defense, it's… something else.

Mike Matheson (who looks like he's aged 30 years), Alexandre Carrier, and Jayden Struble are particularly dreadful.

And the team's goaltenders are perhaps even more of a disaster: Samuel Montembeault bears, at best, a slight resemblance (and even then, you have to say it quickly)… and you have to wonder if the developers have ever seen a photo of Jacob Fowler and Jakub Dobes.

It's a total failure across the board.

Unsurprisingly, it's not much better for the team's supporting forwards. Just like with Dobes and Fowler, you have to wonder if the developers used the wrong photos when creating the faces of Alex Newhook and Alexandre Texier.

And it's not much better for the others either.

Let's just say those faces don't really look like they're from 2026, and we're still pretty far from photorealism. There are a lot more completely botched faces than ones that actually look like the real players on the Habs, anyway.

And Josh Anderson, too, falls into the first category. It's really, really terrible.


In a nutshell

– Brendan Gallagher, on the other hand, turned out pretty well.

– A major boost for the Diamondbacks.

– Good news.

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