Hey bro, basketball.

Picked this up as part of PS+ and gave it a shot, since I don't think I've played a basketball game for probably 20 years. Apparently basketball games are now Monster Hunter level of detail MMO's? At least the career mode is. I started with that mode and quickly drowned in trying to decipher stats for the gangly, balding baller with the too-long arms that I created (and named Butts McGiggity at the prompting of my very adult partner). There were a thousand cut scenes that I started skipping almost immediately and then I was dropped in my home base. Do newly-drafted NBA stars get an entourage of assistants and a flashy condo downtown as part of the deal? Interesting.

Looking at the names of my crew, I noticed that my girlfriend was my manager and thought that was strange. So, I tried to go back and make a female player to start a WNBA career... not an option. Weird for 2023, guys. Anyhow, went back into my long-armed dude career and apparently there's a story of some beef between another guy and me? And my fans don't like me or something? What is happening with this basketball game? Why does it take an hour to get to the first game? And when you do get to the first game, there's no tutorial on what all the buttons do? I guess you've gotta be a long-time player to just jump into career mode. Anyways, I helped my team win the summer whatever, walked across town to the VP of plot advancement to do some thing about the artificial drama with who cares and then played my first NBA game. Felt good about scoring a point or two and earning a solid C and then hit up that main Playstation menu to pick a different game and never return to this one.

I guess I'll try again in another couple decades.

Review from thedonproject.com

This is about as listless as 2k has felt in years.

I picked it up for pretty cheap, $13, on some sort of All-Star weekend sale. It's 2k the same as ever. They added this new 'Eras' mode to the Association mode to celebrate this being, another, Jordan edition but it's pretty thin and dull. It's super cool to see the league evolve year over year, don't get me wrong. But the draft classes are incomplete and you can't really alter too much about how it all plays out (like you can't change anything about the teams that are entering the league in case you wanted to keep the Grizzlies in Vancouver or change the Toronto relocation bid to something else).

Don't get me wrong, it's neat. And it's a step ahead of most other AAA sports releases. But that's an extraordinarily low bar. The historic draft classes are also basically useless in other association modes as they're largely incomplete (draft classes will contain only two real players sometimes). It's a neat thing but games like BBGM do it far better.

There are some neat additions to playing with the WNBA such as the ability to expand the league. But it's still weirdly handicapped. For whatever reason playing as a woman in the game is still a half-assed copy of the male career mode. The WNBA expansion is neat but it's only two franchises that can be added and you can't share your creations or save your own. So they always have to be made entirely from scratch. The limitation seems artificial and I'm not sure why the WNBA can't be expanded further or why their created pieces can't be shared like the NBA version.

Gameplay is the same as ever and the myTeam mode is just as predatory and gacha filled as ever.

All-in-all there's very, very little different from the 2k22 version of the game and in some ways a few things feels like minor steps back or just new frustrations. It's still the most competent AAA sports release on the market, but that's not something we need to sing their praises for.

Ridiculous. NBA2K22's re-skin. No next-gen on PC. Several relevant players without Face Scan. Boring offline mode. MyCareer forces you to buy in-game currency all the time, which is very expensive outside the US by the way. You pay the full price of the game to get frustrated in the first 50 hours, because at the beginning it's very hard to level up MP without the in-game currency and the appropriate animations. When you get a level 90 character it's kinda cool, but it doesn't last long. It used to be better, they really ruined the career mode. It's repetitive, events are irrelevant, no major updates, the community lacks engagement and the grind is extremely tedious. I only had fun playing with friends, but it didn't last long either. It's a slot machine, stay away. I won't play the franchise on PC again until 2K updates to Next-gen, since 2K24 still in Current...