Welcome to our Is that a good free mobile game series. In this series we look at games from both the App Store and the Play Store and review them. At the end of the article we try to answer the question – Is the current game a one of the best smartphone games? Is it a good free mobile game? For this review, we’re looking at Ice League Hockey by Koality Game LLC!
Your Answer Up Front:
The developers definitely put in a lot of time and effort to release what could have been a great game, combining both team management and sports into a neat little package, but the decision to release the game as a free to play title riddled with microtransactions makes it a very unfortunate disappointment. Even if you are willing to spend the $2.99 to unlock Premium Edition, you’ll still be facing the Coin microtransactions.
What is Ice League Hockey?
Ice League Hockey is Koality Game’s sports title that takes the player into the world of Ice Hockey.
What’s the difference between wrestling and hockey? The fights are real in hockey.
RS (reviewer) asking the real questions here.
The reality of that joke is even more painful after having played Koality Game’s Ice League Hockey, because oh boy it pains me deeply.
Upon the game’s first launch after installing, you’re greeted with a pretty comprehensive controls tutorial. I personally applaud every single developer that makes sure you know how to play their game, specially when it comes to faster paced titles that rely on on-screen controls. Left thumb to move around your player, right thumb to shoot and body check.
Nice and clean (well, as clean as hockey can get before the first fight, right?). Assuming you’re only interested in hitting the ice rink as fast as possible, you’re good to go. Interested in seasons and managing your team? Well, you’re probably going to have a bad time.
Leagues and Seasons
One of the stand-out features of Ice League Hockey, as the very title even hints at, are leagues and seasons. And this is where my complaints begin. And this is going to be the general theme going forward.
Upon getting to the main menu, you’re greeted by a fairly stand-out button: “GET PREMIUM!”. Out of pure curiosity, upon tapping said button, you can see what exactly Premium Edition is all about: gated content. Quite a bit of it, even.
The Premium Edition (currently priced at $2.99) unlocks quite a few things that should definitely not be locked behind a paywall, and let’s go through all of the 4 additions:
CUSTOMIZE Entire Leagues
This is very vague. In reality, the entirety of Custom Leagues is locked up. You can mess around and get a clue as to what Custom Leagues imply, but most of the buttons in that particular sub-menu are locked, with the ever-present GET PREMIUM! being on-screen.
Without this, you’re stuck with the default season settings.
IMPORT Custom Content
This is obviously not explained and is probably tied into the custom leagues. Why it’s even mentioned as a “feature” that you can’t opt out of anyway is beyond me. Call it what you will, but I’ll choose to name it deceptive marketing.
EXTRA Season Settings
As with the Custom Content import feature, this is clearly directly tied into the custom leagues and not “optional”. I’m starting to think that they REALLY want your money at this point.
TEN Season Save Slots
Custom leagues aside, I find THIS to be the biggest offender of them all. By default, you get THREE, yes, THREE save slots, with SEVEN slots locked. Yes, saving is now a premium feature. This is pretty much the point where I see many people swiftly dropping the game and never thinking of it again.
However, in the interest of sticking to our mission, or at least attempt, to fix the mobile gaming market, let’s push on through the paywalls and gated features.
Game Modes
Quick Play
Quick Play is pretty straight forward. Pick your team and your opponents, mess with a few game settings (the funniest of which is just setting it to CPU v CPU) and get onto the ice. Why there’s an AI v AI mode is beyond me, since it is as literal as it gets. You’ll just be watching the pixel-art players go against each other until the time’s up (and yes, you CAN speed it up). This “feature” smells more like a tech demo thing than an actual release-appropriate mode. I’ll come back to this later in the review.
Season Mode
Currently you can take the role of General Manager of a team, with Commissioner and Career modes coming in the following months (as of writing this review, Commissioner is scheduled for a January release and Career sometime in February).
Upon going into General Manager mode, you’ll find most of the season settings locked behind the Premium paywall, with only very basic settings being available. Thankfully you can still pick your team from the available presets. Even though there’s variable Offense and Defense stats, these don’t really seem to matter too much and aren’t explained anywhere. Just pick your favorite, I guess.
Going into the season itself, you’re met with the AI v AI “feature” once again, in the form of a “SIM” button next to each game. While this somewhat defeats the purpose of the game, I suppose it is a valid way to play the game from the perspective of a General Manager. Hockey Management Simulator 2022? Close enough.
Upon finishing a game you’ll notice that you’ve gained coins. What exactly these are isn’t immediately obvious, but you’ll want to hold onto all of these, as the only other method of obtaining them is, yes, you guessed it, microtransactions! For real money! Woo!
Going back to the Season Week screen, you’ll only be able to actually play your own team’s game, the rest being locked in for simulation, which you can either watch or just hit the Simulate All button to go onto the next week. Kinda cool, but ultimately kind of a pointless feature (unless you’re a hardcore pixelated hockey fan).
A thing that I’ve noticed is that, no matter if you win or lose a game, you seem to gain a coin, so being patient enough, you can bypass that particular set of microtransactions at the cost of your time.
There are a myriad of features and tweaks available to the player, most of them being hidden behind submenus of submenus with little to no explanation or hint to their existence, with enough of them being locked behind coin costs to lead me to a very certain conclusion.
I know I’ve talked a lot about the negatives of the game without pointing out the positives.
Is Ice League Hockey a good free mobile game?
Ice League Hockey suffers from the F2P-P2W plague. Graphically it is impressively put together, with the pixel art being on point. Perhaps disappointing (and annoying after a while) is the sound, which is repetitive to the point where you’ll want to turn off the music and keep the SFX on.
The developers definitely put in a lot of time and effort to release what could have been a great game, combining both team management and sports into a neat little package, but the decision to release the game as a free to play title riddled with microtransactions makes it a very unfortunate disappointment. Even if you are willing to spend the $2.99 to unlock Premium Edition, you’ll still be facing the Coin microtransactions.
My initial review from December 2021 also included extensive complaints about the control scheme, however most of them have been resolved in version 1.02, which leads me to conclude that the developers are passionate enough about their games to listen to feedback and provide fixes and improvements, which makes my final thoughts even more conflicted.
Unlike my other reviews, I’ll be giving this game two ratings.
As a F2P title:
As a premium, microtransaction-free game (priced at, let’s say, $5-10):
The entire game can be summed up in just a few words: Wasted potential due to the poor decision to include microtransactions.
How To Download Ice League Hockey?
Ice League Hockey is available on the iPhone, iPad And M1 Macs via the App Store and on the Play Store for Android Smartphones, Tablets and Chromebooks.
If you want to play the game on an M1 equipped Mac, you can read our article on How to play iOS Games on a Mac.
Where To Next?
Congrats, you made it to the end of the article where we asked the question: Is Ice League Hockey a good free mobile game? I hope it was beneficial to you. It’s also beneficial to us to have you stick around the blog more. We have more reviews of good free or premium mobile games, such as Thumper: Pocket Edition or QB Planets!
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