NBA 2K18

DON’T CARE ABOUT BASKETBALL? DOESN’T MATTER.

$79 | PC, PS4, PS3, XO, 360, Switch | www.2k.com If NBA 2K18 were a basketball player, it would be LeBron James. Still the best in its field, but also in noticeable decline. Could you ever say LeBron James was a bad player? No, and you couldn’t say this was a bad game either. Nevertheless, the natural tendency is to focus on the decline rather than the good. So let’s rail against that. This is one of the best sports games around. Visual Concepts manages to simulate basketball not just on a granular, squeaks-on-the-hardwood level, but as a sports ecosystem filled with cameos from NBA heroes. In many ways, it’s better at basketball than FIFA and PES are at football. Building on years of refinements, it plays beautifully with all the ebbs and flows of the real game. That’s been true for years, but the step up in animations is noticeable here.

This year sees My Career mode, in which you create a rookie and turn them into an NBA superstar, transformed into a San Andreasalike open-world game. If you were being unkind, you’d say this was essentially a menu overhaul, but it sells the idea that you’re living the NBA life. However, the irritating and entirely unskippable cutscenes pull in the opposite direction. What’s more, they put you in a mindset to notice everything else that’s wrong, and chief on that list is the virtual currency (VC) grind central to the experience. It takes a long time for your player to be effective in NBA or multiplayer games if you don’t buy VC with real cash, since the game drip-feeds it at a trickle.

What NBA 2K18 amounts to, all things considered, is an undeniably masterful sports simulation which attempts something no-one else in the genre has tried before, and largely succeeds. And yet it does so largely thanks to having been streets ahead of the competition for years.