Anybody who knows me knows that I never miss an opportunity to rant about how far this franchise has fallen, besotted by an addiction to MyTeam card pack sales and MyPlayer Virtual Currency sales that has left the MyGM mode in shambles and the core competency of the game - the simulation of the game of basketball - in many ways stuck in the halcyon days of its single player efforts, which inarguably crested a decade ago with the introduction of Michael Jordan and the Jordan Challenge in NBA 2K11 - though the mode's follow-up, 2K12's NBA's Greatest, was arguably more comprehensive and feature complete.

NBA 2K22 is still all of that - it's gross, it's opportunistic, it's most interesting mode for older basketball fans - MyTeam - is still more casino than card collecting video game and still more "Christ we have to figure out how to make Shaq relevant in the modern NBA" rather than "hehe let's see these scrawny modern centers deal with the size of speed of the man who once played Steel on the big screen!" MyGM hasn't seen a significant investment of resources since, I mean, since 2K12 if we're being honest, though they'll always pay their lip service. And the game ultimately still slips into a bit of a scripting trap too often, a legacy issue dating back to the Dreamcast days that stands out all the more after two decades of basketball gaming and the competition completely snuffed out. It's online performance is also still fucking trash - I really don't understand how anyone could enjoy playing this game competitively with the state of the input lag, but I suppose that's been going on for long enough who has time to care anymore?

That said, the number's right there: 34 hours, honest as can be. For all its faults, NBA 2K22 is a great showcase for the newest consoles, MyTeam's abusive attitude towards players can't obscure that baseline dopamine hit of collecting even your least favorite favorite players from your childhood, and in the parlance of Deadspin (R.I.P.) Remembering Some Guys, while the on-court product might not look or feel exactly like basketball looks or feels these days but thanks to a new locomotion and animation branching system at least doesn't feel like giants stomping through a mud field anymore.

In other words, NBA 2K22 is still kind of terrible - but if you're a basketball fan, it's alright? Ugh.

Solo career is already unplayable because 2K Sports shut down the servers at the beginning of 2024.

Tried the MyLeague mode, but it is still the same since I started with the license (in NBA 2K16).

Kinda sad to see how they have ruined the game for a few years...

After spending so long playing 2K, something finally clicked with me and I realized all the shit I've been putting up with in this series that I would never normally put up with from a AAA developer. The basketball simulation is polished - it has to be, or else people would never spend so much money on an online component. But there is just so much to complain about here that it'd be death by a million cuts for anything that isn't the biggest basketball simulation on the market.

Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with including a career mode each year that increasingly makes me feel like someone has retrofitted a student film with mentions of Gatorade sponsorships and JBL headphones. Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with forgetting my audio settings at the end of each quarter, blasting my ears with five times the volume for a second before returning to normal. Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with making me watch full-video car advertisements before every game.

It's gross. It sucks for basketball fans that this is the only real option, given that EA has decided it wasn't worth competing (to say nothing of EA's reputation as a company). I want something better for basketball sims, I want to feel less guilty when I buy the game for a measly nine dollars. It's frankly incredible that Take-Two's greed has so thoroughly coated the game with slime that it deprives you of the enjoyment of basketball, because every break in the action reminds you where the development priorities lie - not in fixing bugs, not in improving the UX, but in finding increasingly blatant ways to squeeze a little extra money out of their game.

Timing: Slightly Early
Shot Contest: Wide Open
3-point rating: 99
Shooting badges: 30+
Result: The worst brick I've ever witnessed

I miss 2K21 prev-gen metas