Took me about 41.5 hrs to play through the entire 84-game season and playoffs, playing as the Buffalo Sabres.
From about the 20th game on, I played on the highest difficulty setting: Pro. For about 2/3 of the season, I had it set for 10 min periods before cutting it down to the shortest length of 5 min when I began to consistently win games by 6+ goals. Once you figure out how to check to separate the player from the puck and a few ways of having a very high probability of scoring, the challenge virtually disappears, even on Pro difficulty. I do think they upped the goalies' save ability for the playoffs, as my success with what worked during the regular season seemed to be drastically reduced.
While it's a decent game, there are a few things that knock my rating down. The first is false advertising, as on the back of the box, one of the features listed is stat tracking -- there is no stat tracking. There is no option to pull your goalie for an extra attacker. There are no penalty shots. You get credited with extra results in the standings -- I finished the 84-game regular season with a 95-9-2 record (my actual record was 78-6-0). While it does have short clips of actual game footage that play when there's a big hit or a great save or goal, the load time for the couple second clip is about 10 seconds both to load it and to return to the game, which destroys any flow -- fortunately, you can turn this feature off. You get absolutely nothing special when you win the Stanley Cup -- the clinching game simply ends like any other game.
They game does support the 4-player multi-tap, which I'm guessing would be a plus. It also has a challenge mode with two events that are part of the skills competition during the All-Star break -- Fastest Man, where you race around the rink, and Shootout, where you have to hit four plates on the corners of the goal. These might be fun for 2-players, but not so much by yourself.
