NBA 2K10 Review
NBA 2K10, like Shawn Kemp, is awesome when it's at its best, but it's never able to overcome its flaws and reach its potential.
The biggest addition to this year's game is easily its best feature: My Player lets you create an athlete (unless you want to wear number 23 for the Bulls, which is the only no-go) and then puts you on the road to becoming an NBA star. You start off in the summer league, continue on to training camp, and then take a trip to the NBA's development league, where you must prove that you're ready for the big time; it's a long, but ultimately satisfying, grind.
Initially, your created player is terribly unskilled, but your on-court moves eventually earn you points that you can use to (very, very slowly) improve your rookie's attributes. But it's how the game grades your performance that makes My Player so engrossing; you'll want to be a good teammate -- something extremely rare in the "me, me, me" world of videogame sports. Nearly everything you do on the court has a positive or negative impact on your grade, and, naturally, scoring, dishing assists, and grabbing rebounds are important. But it's the little stuff, like boxing out, setting a pick, not letting your man score, or making a smart double-team, that earns you the most points and really gets you involved in the game. You may not make a big impact on the score sheet every game, but, because the reward is so great for being a solid teammate, you'll actually enjoy doing the little things.
My Player mode is an excellent addition, but it's not without its flaws. Even after summer league, training camp, over a dozen training drills, 15 games in the NBA D-League, and six more in the NBA, my player only had a 46 rating. I enjoy seeing my guy improve gradually, but it's ridiculous to have a six-foot-six NBA shooting guard who has never blocked a shot, hit a 3-pointer, or dunked a ball. Because of the slow player progression, issues like frequent timeouts and substitutions, teams that almost always use the entire 24-second clock, and refs that take forever to inbound the ball make games feel even more long and tedious. And the game penalizes you for seemingly insignificant things, like when your opponent scores on a fast break, but you don't hustle down the court fast enough, or for being out of position (not that the game ever tells you where to go), or for just holding on to the ball too long. None of the aforementioned issues are deal-breakers, but they keep My Player from being quite as awesome as it should be.
During a regular season game, the announcers will reference current statistics and even what happened in previous meetings between two teams, a feature that also extends to My Player. Kevin Harlan and Clark Kellogg smartly pointed out when my player made his first-ever NBA appearance, and they even noted the first bucket of my NBA career. This made an already special moment even more meaningful. When combined with players who now show emotion, excellent TV-style replays, and top-notch character animations, 2K10's presentation goes a long way toward making the game more enjoyable.
On-court action hasn't seen much change. For the most part, this is a good thing; the NBA 2K series has always had solid gameplay. The most noticeable change this year is the addition of a turbo button, which saps your player's stamina if used too much. This new mechanic forces you to be smart about when you expend your energy, but it does this in a nonintrusive way -- you need to be mindful of it, but you don't need to obsess over it.
The gameplay didn't need an overhaul, but it's too bad that some ever-present series flaws didn't get the attention they've needed for years. Although the menus have been revamped, they're still cumbersome and difficult to navigate. It's still too easy to miss lay-ups. Players will often take horrible shots inside the paint. The A.I. does a terrible job managing the clock. Players don't work hard enough to get open if you don't call a play, and they'll even walk right out of bounds with the ball and commit backcourt violations for no reason. Frequent 3-second violations will also drive you nuts -- and that's with the refs only calling some of the infractions.
Those issues are annoying, but they aren't the most severe of NBA 2K10's problems. The framerate, particularly on the 360, can get downright nasty. It seems to be better on the PS3, but then again, that could be because several of my games literally had no fans in attendance for some inexplicable reason. But both systems' online components were a complete disaster: The PS3 wouldn't let me start a game, while the 360 occasionally let me start a game, but then abruptly ended it after a few seconds. The game's forums are filled with complaints, so I'm not the only one having these issues; while 2K has a sometimes effective workaround for the framerate (and another for your player getting cloned in My Player) and promises a patch soon, the fact is that this game is available in stores now, and it doesn't work like a retail game should.
Although 2K10's many nagging flaws prevent the game from achieving greatness, they don't keep it from being fun -- especially if you're going to spend most of your time in the excellent My Player mode. I really loved the feature and became completely invested in making the virtual Aaron Thomas a great baller. But as much as I love the mode, I know I won't enjoy it as much or as long as I would if the game weren't riddled with technical problems.
More Sports Games
- NBA 2K10
- PS3, PS2, Wii, 360, PSP
- 2K Sports
- 2K Sports
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1UP Editor Score: B-
Average Community Score: B+
Players: 15145 Hours: 20226
Based on last 7 days of Raptr player activity.
Based on 1UP traffic, this game is:
#6,023 of 27,541 on 1UP
#694 of 1,453 in PS3
#519 of 2,316 in Sports
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