A four-button pad will give you most options available immediately to your fingers. An eight-button pad will take care of the rest. Line changes are simple to do on the fly and button layouts are all adjustable. While not atrocious it does seem that AI is not improving as fast other aspects of this game and really looks bad because of it. There are some positives to report here.
Goalies play smarter than they did before and the frequency of players going in offside is down too.
Your AI teammates will more than likely be at the point to receive your pass from down low. On the downside the default settings for this game totally give the user an advantage. The AI will not pressure, check, or score many goals. There is a happy medium that is achievable if you change the settings to give the computer enough skill and deteriorate the ability and skating of your own team. This requires a lot of tweaking to achieve a decent level of competition without getting the feeling that you are being cheated.