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...

NBA 2k22 is as polished as ever. The 2k basketball franchise routinely rivals the MLB The Show series as the best annual sports game. And this may be the year that 2k22 is the undisputed winner of that battle, though this has more to do with this year's The Show than it does 2k.

Franchise mode is clean and crisp, running quickly and collecting all the stats one might want. 2k22's MyNBA is the pinnacle of the career/association/dynasty/franchise mode among sports games. It's the deepest, most immersive, most customizable sports franchise mode yet.

But there are a few 'buts.' The MyWNBA mode has been greatly expanded but still lacks feature parity with its MyNBA counterpart. The W is a nice career mode that meshes well with a more pleasurable sports career experience reminiscent of Madden's former Superstar modes. But your player gains way too much experience way too quickly and some of the accoutrements winds up feeling too frivolous to remain engaging. It sticks out notably when compared to the NBA career mode.

The gameplay is relatively unchanged, as it has been for the last five or so years. It's as stale as ever and the gameplay engine is just chafing badly at this point. Players still have weird interactions under the rim, taking bizarre angles on layups or paint drives, or god forbid they take another fucking jumper in the lane during a breakaway. All of the interior offense comes off as immersion breaking because the engine can't deal with the mechanics. The number of times a player like Boban tosses up a weakly flicked layup from way above the basket instead of just standing-dunking it because the game can't tolerate properly simulating dominant paint play is absurd. God forbid you play as Shaq and you'll see the same issues.

As always, stay away from the online game modes. They're miserable, microtransaction driven RNG fests. The 'green' zone jumper mechanic is infinitely aggravating. Every edition of 2k's 3v3 gacha-game mode is a cancerous race to find the most busted mechanics imaginable. Using Bol Bol or Shaq to chuck 3s because you've mastered their jump shot timer. Giannis remains as dominant as 04 Vick. There are probably genuinely very fun ways to use that sports-card-gacha system in a single player PvE experience. But none is to be found here.

2k is desperately in need of some reinvention. But it also remains the top dog in its genre. It's hard to want them to rock the boat when the formula is so pleasing. Playing 2k franchise mode and simming your way through 99% of it remains the most Football Manager-esque experience basketball has in the video game space. And that's still quite a fun way to play these things.

I first started with 2K12 and then completely abandoned the series with 2K15. I forgot the series even existed until Epic Games gave away 2K21 for free last year. I picked up the game from there and started again. 2K21 was quite a half a game. Even though I was interested in playing it again after a long break, 2K21, which was a game that should not have been released, was inadequate in many aspects, causing you to get bored quickly. Especially as someone who played 2K12, 2K13 and 2K14 for hundreds of hours, I can clearly say that 2K21 bored me at 50 hours.

The fact that My Career mode didn't have any story made the original ownership of the game meaningless. For these reasons, I decided to buy 2K22 when it went on sale on Steam because according to the news I read, 2K22 had a My Career story, albeit a bad one, but I regretted buying it and I realized that the so-called story wasn't worth buying and I was right to quit the series years ago.

2K22 is exactly the same game as 2K21 except for a few minor things, and in some ways it's even worse and unbalanced, intentionally of course. Despite all its problems, 2K21 was a game that was buried more than it deserved. Yes, there was no improvement compared to 2K20, in fact it was even worse, but the same was true for 2K22 right now. You can easily play 2K21 without buying VC. When I left my character, which I started with a very comfortable 60 overal, I had 84 when I left and I was playing with an average of 35.0 points, 15.0, assists at the PG position.

In my 2nd season, there was no record I didn't break. I had 34 assists and scored like 69 points and it didn't matter if the difficulty was HOF or Pro, there was a balanced difficulty in the game. These averages were achieved by playing inside without shooting. If I had shot, it would have been much higher. I was also used to the shot bar, which was the most criticized part of 2K21. It was much better than the new shot bar in 2K22. The 2K22 shot bar seemed much worse to me both in terms of positioning and timing.

On the other hand, 2K22 has completely become Pay to Win. If you don't have dozens of hours a day to play this game without buying VC, it's almost impossible to improve your character. In 2K21, I was selected from the 2nd place in the 1st round with a 60 overal character. In 2K22, although I tried very hard, I could only be selected from the 29th place in the 1st round because the draft system in 2K22 has been made so ridiculous that you can only play 1 match. You are not given any chance to improve your draft rank and you don't have a college career compared to 2K21. There's no story in 2K21, but at least in college you could play a lot more games, and if you worked hard you could even finish with a championship. 2K22, on the other hand, has become incredibly simplistic because it's impossible to get drafted from the first ranks unless you buy VC at the beginning of the game and upgrade your character to 99 overals.

2K22 has been made incredibly difficult. Everyone on the opposing team can either block or steal your ball easily. Likewise, if they find a gap, they can hit a three-pointer. On the other hand, when it comes to your own team's AI, it's so awful that even if you build your entire starting lineup with 99 overal guys, they'll miss wide open threes, try ridiculous shots and play almost zero defense. Not only time and money, but if you're not a patient person this year, 2K22 is definitely a terrible game that you should stay away from unless it's free. 2K and all their games after 2K14 are mostly hated by their audience, but the fact that they are still making games after all these years is because there is no other alternative and people love basketball. Otherwise 2K has no purpose other than to milk their audience like cows.

They don't even care about single player mode in their games anymore. In 2K22, they added a ridiculous task list feature to force players into online matches. This destroyed the whole seriousness of the game. It's also insulting that they still use the old generation graphically for years despite releasing PC games. Today's PCs have long since surpassed the power of consoles, and the fact that they still release PC games with a graphics engine from 2014 is an example of how they don't care about the PC audience.

The only shortcomings on the PC side are not only graphics, but also features that have been removed compared to the console side in many respects. On the other hand, is it too hard to make the game controls with icons suitable for the keyboard? Does everyone have to use a controller while playing this game? As someone who plays the game very well with the keyboard, I am very uncomfortable with this situation.

To summarize, if you are not going to play online games and buy VCs, there is no reason to buy 2K22, especially if you got NBA 2K21 for free and played it last year like I did. 2K's PC games will never entertain you and will waste your time and money without giving you a good basketball gaming experience. If you are a PC gamer, you should also stay away from the upcoming 2K23, which is the same thing, at least for the first 6 months of its release.

There are very few companies as bad as 2K in this community. Even Ubisoft's games are of a certain quality, but 2K is greedy and I hope that in the coming years we will see a more decent company making games about basketball and we can witness 2K disappear from this market as soon as possible. At the very least they should stop making such crap for PC just for money when they don't care.

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