We know the reputation 2K's servers have for their NBA franchise, but it's fair to say that things are more stable in the 2019 iteration: what I was particularly interested in was the career mode – as with the rest of the sports games, anyway. The polished gameplay is effective, obviously, and betrays a real concern for kinetics and staging, so I have no complaints, given my basketball inexperience. The main problem with the story is that it is absolutely disjointed. The decisions you can make are inconsistent and the player will spend more time listening to dirty pitches about shoes than seeing interesting scenes. The Draft Combine mini-games break the pace of the story, especially as the off-field controls are miserable. As usual, female representation is reduced to its minimum element, with the WNBA seemingly there for the sake of being here. As such, I imagine the game will appeal to the casual basketball fan, but will upset the true NBA 2K gamer, due to too many approximations in its gameplay.