I haven’t played basketball, either in real life or as a video game, since high school and even then it’s not I fully understood the sport anyway. But as most will know, this title was a giveaway on the Epic platform a while back and I was curious about what a modern sports game is like these days. Basketball at least isn’t totally cryptic to me like American football is but do note that I’m only taking a brief look at this game so this isn’t a real review or anything like that as this is all too unfamiliar to me. I don’t even know what most of the terms used in this game means.

This game is also huge, with multiple modes you can engage with and the official manual only gives basic instructions on about what the buttons on the controller does. You can simply enter quick play mode for a game with any team, there are the practice and tutorial modes, you can take control of a whole team and switch between different players as needed or you can take on the role of a manager and try to make a successful and profitable team. But I’d bet that the mode that most players engage with is where you build a personalized player of your own, down to looks, physical build and skills, and guide him on a career from high school all the way through the NBA. You get a complete, scripted story with your player being the son of a famous player and the other characters being played by well-known actors. It’s quite a production but it also seems somewhat buggy as the cinematics freeze occasionally, necessitating a game restart. I also dislike the loading time between screens, probably because the game needs to call home to its server every once in a while.

As I’ve played Football Manager 2013, it doesn’t surprise to see the profusion of statistics in this game but it still is daunting to see so many numbers and understand so little about what they mean. There are all kinds of skills, badges which gives different kinds of bonuses and of course your physical characteristics matters in gameplay as well. You can apparently even select the animations used for different types of moves and it makes a difference in terms of game mechanics as well. Note that creating a player sets your future potential but you start out much weaker. You improve your character by earning this game’s equivalent of experience points, called VC here, and spending it to boost your skills. This seems to be quite a grind so you’re kindly given the option of buy a big whack of VCs with real world money to make that go faster. Naturally I declined to do so as I’m not planning on spending much time on this but it’s easy to see why this would be tempting.

All those skills because your character can pull off all kinds of moves during the actual matches. I basically only know how to do basic things like dribble, shoot and pass but a quick look into the tutorial shows the ridiculous variety of moves available. In addition to normal passing, you can bounce the ball to pass it to a teammate, jump to pass it higher, do a fake pass to misdirect opponents and much more. This is reminiscent of the complexity of fighting games with the extensive move sets that you must learn. Then of course the game scores your performance in all kinds of ways that I’m sure basketball fans understand but I can barely grasp. I mean I understand scoring and assists but even things like performing a pass that leads to an opponent committing a foul raises my performance assessment or even more cryptic measures like filling lanes properly. These performance score affect how desirable your player is to teams and of course pulling moves off earns you VC and eventually badges.

Anyway I can only engage with this game on the most superficial level, but it’s enough for me to appreciate how fun this can be to basketball fans and how deep it is. It’s not just about controlling your own guy and being aware of the mark you’re assigned, you have to keep up a high level of situational awareness about what everyone else is doing too. It’s about reading the flow of the game and expecting where the ball is going to be next. As a novice, it’s so frustrating to have to keep close to the mark I have been assigned but he is able to make use of both his teammates and my own to block my movements. I can appreciate how real teams plan out and practice these kinds of movements. The animations in this game are incredible and you will need to be able read them properly to understand what is going on and what to do in response.

I do feel some temptation to put in more time to learn to play this properly but I just don’t have the long-term interest in the sport or the dedication to focus on just this one game to make that practical. The need to grind your character’s skill also kind of annoys me and it must quite annoying for those who want to try more than one type of player build. But it was fun to look at how far basketball games have come and though I can see that the models aren’t all that high resolution, the focus is on making the faces recognizable and the incredible variety of animations, making this game look really good. I probably won’t touch another basketball game for at least another twenty years after this but it was fun to take a look at this.