NBA 2K16

Defenses are winning championships, and NBA 2K16's AI improvement in that area is doing wonders this year. As a result, the offensive tactics I used to use in NBA 2K15 no longer work. So, I was forced to think like a trainer and had to constantly adapt to the challenges offered. Which player will I bring onto the pitch? What tactical changes do I need to make? When will I use the downtime? A whole other dimension! To sum up, NBA 2K16 offers a great representation of today's basketball. For fans, this is a dream come true whether you play online or not.

Don't think the previous titles weren't visually successful, but let's be clear, NBA 2K16 really looks better than the other games. Player models have been improved, muscle and skin renderings are more detailed, and all together allow us to enjoy an absolutely stunning title. Faces, hairstyles, different builds and stature are more real than life. In short, there is an extremely varied and wide range of players. In general, the graphic rendering was very appreciated by the community this year, as well as the new opening sequences to present the teams before the start of matches.

Behind the scenes, Kennie Smith joins Ernie Johnson and Shaq for pre-game, half-time and post-game shows. All of this is really entertaining and the pace of the discussions benefits from a successful chemistry. Greg Anthony replaces Steve Kerr as sports commentator. The interactions between the commentators are fun, but there are more weird reactions than in the previous installments of the license, although this is not frequent. Player interviews are making a comeback as well, but unfortunately many are old footage previously used in other parts. Nevertheless, some unpublished and really successful interviews counterbalance all this.

Improve your game

The best reason to play NBA 2K16 this year is because of its improved gameplay in quite a few aspects, which makes the gaming experience even more real than life. In previous rounds, I have always found it easy to score points by making my way through the AI-managed defense, going around in circles and forcing it to make mistakes. This is no longer the case this year. Zigzagging all over the place while waiting for the mistake will often only lead to loss of ball and frustration. Additionally, attempting to push back the defensive line will eventually cause you to miss your shots, or they will simply be blocked. You will understand, the only way to score points is to use real strategies!

Above all, do not hesitate to improvise because the AI of the opposing coach will eventually understand your way of playing and will always try new strategies to try to stop you. An example during a game: the defenders are constantly moving backwards, which allows me to take shots in suspension, but after several successful attempts, they started to circulate all around the racket to stop me. This constant game of cat and mouse kept me alert throughout the game and forced me to renew myself with every action.

The controls have been adjusted and lightened, adding new buttons dedicated to new types of passes. The controls seem more responsive when trying to roll back a defender, since you no longer have to wait for the animation to complete to perform the next move. On the other hand, I quickly realized that even perfect shots did not necessarily find the way to the basket. you have to be precise and have the right conditions to shoot. Yet another new detail that makes the whole thing even more realistic.

Whose career?

There are an astonishing number of ways to play NBA 2K16. All the game modes I've been waiting for are back, a few with some interesting innovations from elsewhere. The new “Play Now Online” mode makes head-to-head matches a little more interesting since it includes the “Promotion” and “Relegation System” functions. Both MyGM and MyLeague modes now contain new management functions, which allow you to go further and completely rebuild your team with a bewildering array of options. This same team editor can also be used in the "My Team" mode, the collectible card game, which offers more challenges and more ways to earn virtual money.

But the most notable and popular mode is “My Career,” which has been revamped in a whole different way. Spike Lee wrote and directed this mode as a documentary film. Once you create your character, you step into the shoes of a high school basketball prodigy from Harlem whose dream is to make it into the NBA. The high school games were a bit boring, no commentary and no real challenge, since in my case, my character was the leader of his team and was the greatest player on the field. Despite this, getting recruited by famous universities is an extremely successful and really enjoyable journey.

The story itself is mediocre and the dialogues too banal, even if the whole is still well played by the actors. A few interesting and emotional moments caught my attention, but this mode, made like a movie, is ultimately unconvincing for a game supposed to be about our favorite players. The most memorable example I can cite was when my friends and family were giving me advice on whether to stay in college: basically all the characters were telling me "only you can make a decision." And a second later, I found myself directly in the NBA, without having made any choice.

Even with not really paying attention to the lack of choice, the story quickly became inconsistent during my first season. The characters in the cutscenes were trying to make me think I was a single player, but my overall rating was only 55. Hard to believe them… AI upgrades are also present in career mode. As a result, winning a match is not nearly as easy as it was in previous years. So I really felt like I was pulling the team down… but still, I signed advertising contracts with shoe brands, like I really was a star.

Forward!

The "Living the Dream" mode concludes after your first season, which contains only eight playable matches. After that, the mode really kicks you into the seasons with 82 games per year and offers new ways to improve your player in their spare time. That's why I can recommend NBA 2K16 to you, even if the career mode is not a real success. In the end, all this is just an appetizer to make things look pretty, what matters is that the gameplay has been perfected and is particularly impactful and interesting on the field.

It is important to note that NBA 2K16 continues to bet on its online servers since micro-transactions are present in most game modes. But for the first time in several years, I had relatively few problems with connections since the start of the servers. The "2K Sports Store", where you can spend your virtual currency to purchase items, did not always perform well and the "ProAm" mode, a "5v5 MyPark" with NBA rules, was completely inaccessible for a while. . That aside, the online experience is generally reliable in all other modes.

Those who approach the series for the first time and start from this new chapter really risk being overwhelmed by a mass of material that will make any other sports title ever made pale, but even if you have followed the series for several years, you will hardly not remain impressed by what Visual Concepts put in place. Not that NBA 2K16 is a perfect game (I'll also list the flaws below), but if you are a minimum of basketball fans this is a daydream and any sport (or almost) should have a video game of this magnitude.

As a demonstration of 2K Games' commitment to always offering something new, we find the classic My Career section characterized by a long part called Living a dream, which in about six hours sees us as a young promising basketball player that from the high school circuit goes to the college circuit and finally to the NBA. To direct this long and not always exciting video game feature is Spike Lee, but not surprisingly, given the director's latest rehearsals on the big screen, Vivendo un sogno is not much.

In fact, stereotypes abound and the cut-scenes are not always inspired, so much so that they look more like a TV series with a lot of soap-opera implications. Certainly commendable attempt to entrust such an important section of the game to such an important director, but the result leaves a little dumbfounded. Apart from two or three choices that are up to the player, Living a dream is a completely guided experience and at times even a little tiring, with in addition an evident disconnect between the games played and the phases narrated also visually, with the cut -scenes that appear much less accurate and "worked" than what the graphics engine shows during the matches.

Luckily this section is also one of the few unconvincing aspects of an otherwise excellent game. Just think of the news made in all the other modes, which as usual are many, especially if we go to see what has been done for Pro-Am (similar as a concept to the FIFA Pro Club) and for the My Team mode. The first, which allows you to compete online in a team with other real players, boasts an editor in which the risk is to get lost. The elements to be customized are in fact a flood and fortunately the interface is simple and linear, so much so that Visual Concepts has made the editor available also for the My GM mode, which is always richer in managerial aspects, and My Team, albeit with some limitations that seem justified to us, however.

Then counting the presence of My Park and My League, the amount of content has truly prodigious, also considering the painstaking care with which Visual Concepts has approached even the smallest element and with which it has made it less "attractive ”The microtransactions, which although not missing appear less intrusive than last year. Of course, in order not to have to pay real money and thus have the best stickers in My Team, you have to invest a lot of time gaining the necessary credits in the other modes, but if you already know the trend of the series we are convinced that you will not miss the time.

The most interesting news, however, are those in the game and although at first glance the changes compared to NBA 2K15 may not seem many, in reality the adjustments "under the hood" are numerous as well as important. Small premise. From this year NBA 2K, precisely for these novelties, has become an even more simulation series than it was in the past and unfortunately a real tutorial is missing, to say the least essential for newbies and for those who have little confidence with the model ultra realistic Visual Concepts.

In short, do not be surprised if even at the lowest level of difficulty you will combine little or nothing in the first matches, even if playing online the new matchmaking has proved very effective in pairing us with players at our level, thus avoiding even more humiliating defeats. However, the fact remains that entering "cold" on the pitch is a somewhat traumatic experience and, despite having played a lot in the last three episodes of the series, I also struggled in the first hours of the game to assimilate the novelties in the controls.

Theory and practice are sometimes miles apart: In theory, NBA 2K15 was by far the best sports game of the past year. In practice, however, the PC version suffered from bugs and performance problems at the time of release, which cost a lot of fun. And theoretically, NBA 2K16 should do everything better now. We'll only tell you whether this works in practice in the technology section at the end of this article. First we turn to the biggest innovation in NBA 2K16, the story career. It has what it takes to set real standards in the sports game genre - at least in theory.

Call me a freak

The typical NBA up-and-coming star is colorful, comes from a poor background, loves mom's burgers and would give his last baseball cap for a basketball career. His real name is Frequency Vibrations (!), Nickname "Freq" (pronounced "Freak"), and he has a really nice twin sister who taught him the basics of basketball. At least that is how Oscar winner Spike Lee (known from the drama Malcolm X, among other things) imagines an aspiring basketball rookie.

From the hood to the NBA

We love the idea of wrapping the career mode in a kind of documentary film in which Spike Lee himself repeatedly interviews the characters involved. But unfortunately we were pretty disillusioned after playing through the story. The cut scenes, some of which are 15 to 20 minutes long, are well crafted and professionally set to music. However, the plot suffers from clichés and stereotypical characters. There is, for example, the sleazy Italo agent Dom Pagnotti, who cannot get enough money. Or Freq's best friend Vic, with whom he made the Hood unsafe as a child and who could prove to be a career stumbling block because he posts piquant private information on Twitter and keeps getting into trouble with the police.

With increasing success, Freq himself turns out to be a one-dimensional character who sees the fulfillment of all dreams in a pretty bride, fast cars and video games. The female figures like Freq's twin sister Cee-Cee also lack rough edges. It's a shame, we would have expected more depth from Spike Lee overall.

On top of that, it seems strange that our created player is white, but comes from an Afro-American family. Here, as in many of his previous works, Lee obviously wants to counter racist resentment. That is laudable, but in our case it seems artificial.

Another shame: you have no decision-making options within the story - apart from choosing the college team. Why can't we choose our agent ourselves? Why can't we actively influence our relationship with the other characters? A lot of potential has been wasted here to do justice to the (narrative) medium of video games.

You can't get more atmosphere!

If we don't watch cutscenes in career mode or train in our private hall, we prove ourselves on the court. A total of 15 matches - three in high school, four in college and eight in the rookie season - apply during the first MyCareer year to complete. How we do there doesn’t affect the plot - we’ll definitely get a place at an NBA club.

When we have finally finished the story, the career mode works as in the previous year from the second year onwards. We experience highs and lows in life as an NBA professional and, if desired, play all 82 games of a full season. We are also looking for sponsors, making important contacts and using social media to gain popularity with fans.

What is new, however, is the online-only mode 2K Pro-Am, which allows 5-on-5 tournaments that are streamed on 2KTV (for the second time at the start). As long as the 2K servers allow us - so far we haven't even managed to get a Pro-Am match running on the console.

On the other hand, the online leagues that returned with NBA 2K16 worked smoothly in the test, both on the PC and on the console: We play our way up in ten game classes by beating other human participants from the "beginners" to the "best of all time" league . For gamers who appreciate competitive competition, this is an extremely motivating mode in which victory and defeat play an important role and are incorporated into the ratings. The positive thing about this is that the strengths of our opponents automatically adapt to our current balance sheet, fair matches are guaranteed.

The most beautiful sports game ever

On the pitch itself, NBA 2K16 is a force: developer Visual Concepts has taken over the famous gameplay framework of its predecessor and added a number of subtleties, player movements and signature moves. Thanks to the new physics engine, the action feels even more believable, even footwork and the weight of the athletes now have a playful effect. In addition, the defensive is much better this year and hardly leaves us with opportunities to score points in the same way over and over again. The opposing coaches seem to sense attack patterns and even react with tactical changes if we use the same offensive actions too often.

Until we have gotten to grips with the wonderfully intuitive, yet incredibly complex controls, numerous training games are due - even in the absence of a real tutorial. All the more so since the controls have been expanded to include some finesse. For example, bow and floor passes have their own buttons, and we are now activating the posting using the L2 or LT button on our gamepad - yes, on the gamepad. NBA 2K16 is just too complex to play properly with the keyboard or even the mouse. Nevertheless, it is incomprehensible why the developers withheld the option of changing the key assignments on the keyboard. Controlling the menu with the mouse and keyboard is also only tolerable.

Quirks in the court

But now butter with the fish, how is NBA 2K16 now on the PC? Let's put it this way: be on your guard. The sports game ran smoothly on our main test computer despite the mid-range hardware (Core i5-3570K, Geforce GTX 780, 8GB RAM) even in high details with activated image enhancers such as antialiasing. The only downer was a sometimes severe tearing (picture tearing) despite activated VSync. Online matches also went very well.

However, there were problems in our test with other mid-range graphics cards. After playing for a while, the frame rate dropped from 60 to 20 frames per second. When switching to the desktop with ALT + TAB, NBA 2K16 regularly crashes. Many negative reviews on Steam and posts in the Steam forums paint a similar picture. Therefore we devalue NBA 2K16 by 5 points due to technical defects. We advise interested buyers to either wait for a patch or keep the option open to use the Steam return policy.

If the basketball game runs smoothly, it shows off with detailed arenas and spectators as well as even better facial and player animations, the latter already being close to perfection in NBA 2K15. The presentation, which is based on TV broadcasts as usual, including player runs, cheerleaders, organ clips and slow-motion repetitions, leaves nothing to be desired, just like the frenetically cheering audience and the good-humored match commentators. The show trappings before, during and after the games, performed by celebrities like Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal and newcomer Kenny Smith, also adds a lot to the great atmosphere.