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.

Reviewed on Jun 06, 2022


1 Comment


1 year ago

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is what it's actually like being a major athlete in one of America's major sports, where basketball is as much about basketball as it is about Nike shoes, about Gatorade sports drinks, about JBL headphones, about Ruffles chips, about Tissot watches, about Chips Ahoy! cookies, about Clorox cleaning products, about Crocs foam clogs, about FedEx courier services, about Mobil 1 synthetic motor oil, about HyperIce recovery and movement enhancement technology, and about the 2022 Kia K5, with its driver-oriented cockpit, advanced technology, and turbocharged engine options - the 2022 Kia K5: Sporty performance. Smart tech.