Early Access Review

3.5/5

Tape to Tape is a hockey rogue lite that harkens back to the days of NHL 94. There's a "career" mode that contains rogue lite runs with 3 acts where you take on various challenges from basic hockey game where the winner is who scores first, to matches where you may be playing "hockey" but with kicking around a soccer ball that does use different physics and mechanics. There is a long list of unlockable Superstars which act as random teammates that will put one of them on your team at the start of each run. Other unlocks include upgrades to your title character and abilities that you can use to turn the tide of a game. Other than the career mode you can play just basic hockey game or tournament with whatever modifiers you'd like to include.

The game plays a lot like NHL94 so anyone who played the old school NHL games from the Sega Genesis/SNES days will feel right at home. The AI is pretty hit and miss so hopefully that's something the devs will continue to work on until the 1.0 release. Sometimes your teammates will make a break towards the net for a perfect pass, other times they may skate directly into you while you are carrying the puck. There are a few other minor bugs I would experience like being unable to skip the anthem occasionally at the start of a boss match, or having no idea who/why the swap player button chooses which player you switch to control to.

Graphically the game takes on a cel shaded and cartoony caricature graphics style. I wasn't sure what to think of this at first, but it pretty quickly grew on me and does play well to this game.

I hope to see the developers fix up some of the issues here. What's here now in early access yet though is still a pretty entertaining and complete package. I was able to get 100% of the Steam achievements in just over 16 hours, but may still go back from time to time to play random matches or see how the development is coming along. At $20, I would probably still wait to pick this up on sale.