Last year NBA 2K14 dazzled us with new visuals and impressive features. NBA 2K15 hopes to improve on presentation and game play with updated Career, GM, and MYPark modes. We’re here to provide some bullet points of the stuff we liked and disliked in this review.
What we liked
- Presentation is livelier and it better represents a basketball game. The Half-time show has choreographed cheerleaders and a pep talk from the coach. The Pre-Game show is a great addition even if it’s just there for Shaq to be hilarious.
- Excellent soundtrack selection from Pharrell Williams. Varied styles of music on display as opposed to domination by a single genre.
- MYGM is daunting as a mode and has an astounding amount of detail from talking to players to setting the market price of tickets.
- Career Mode has taken a brand new direction after constantly focusing on the draft, and instead forces a rookie to scrape by through a 10-day contract to make it onto a team.
- Social Media is now interactive, players can say hello to friends, trash talk opponents, or promote businesses for sponsorship.
- More NBA Influence in career mode from the players and coach involvement. Players will try to take the rookie under their wing, and the coach will do PowerPoint presentations and call practice scrimmages when things go wrong.
- Attribute System revamped and does away with individual stats. There are six columns to choose from that categorize older stats into one single area. For example, all defensive movements like steals and blocks are under the Defender tab.
- Players now earn badges during the career mode by playing a certain way. This also goes for skill point upgrades that unlock from playing the mode. This assures that people can’t just buy VC to make a 99 rated character out of the gate.
- Players can now choose crowd intro music and arena sounds for scoring high profile moves.
- Basketball is one of the few sports I would actually watch if I didn’t play games all the time. So it’s great that there is a new defender window in MyPlayer mode that shows the stats of a person I am currently guarding. All previous iterations before it would pretend like I knew every player on the court.
Love/Hate Relationship
- Some players look fantastic but others like Chris Bosh will look like they’ve been hitting the crack rock too often. Lebron for instance looks as if he has the body of a prepubescent little boy.
- Career choices boil down to being a nice guy or being an asshole. And if you do act like a prima donna at any time you’ll receive a guilt trip for it from the receiver or fans.
What we didn’t like
- Passing still doesn’t properly designate where the player wants it to go. This is something that wasn’t even a problem in Super Nintendo basketball games. The ball is also floats around and appears in hands for rebounds and passes.
- Practice games don’t reward the player with VC but they make you play five minutes of them regardless.
- Teammates still refuse to take open shots when they have them. The player can throw a wide open pass under the court and they will throw it back.
- Animations can tend to get in the way of gameplay and movement. Players will often feel like they aren’t always in complete control of their character. The computer always looks like they are reacting and moving better than anything you could ever pull off.
- Game functions on queued button presses for actions. So if by any means you’ve pressed jump twice, when the player lands they will attempt to jump again even if a play has unfolded already.
- MyPark is only for the most hardcore of players as the penalty for losing or not being a ball hog is much too high. You will barely earn VC unless you’re winning and you won’t earn much ranking as a result.
- Server issues have caused tons of disconnections that make MyPark inaccessible to players or downright unplayable.
- Commentary on positions not the actual player themselves. The commentators will say something like “You wouldn’t expect a dunk out of someone that size,” when the player is 6’6 at the Point Guard position.
- Stupid timeouts and substitutions that happen at the end of a quarter. Even after the next quarter the player will have to be subbed back in to keep playing.
- I. will decide to do illegal picks that don’t make sense. It’s almost always at the 3-point line when the point-guard is running the ball up the floor.
Conclusion
NBA 2K15 is still the best simulation basketball game on the market. NBA Live has a lot to challenge when it releases later this year. I’ve got my minor gripes about the gameplay but it’s still one of the most realistic looking sports games ever. NBA 2K15 receives four stars out of five from Geek Citadel. Every year NBA 2Kgets closer and closer to the real thing.
