Wow. It's been over a month and a half since I last reviewed a game! This is due to two factors. I picked two really long games for my next choices, and I've been travelling a lot for work which takes away my hour lunch break for handhelds. Put these two together and you have some slow progress on two absolutely huge games! Anyway, I finally won an NBA Finals with MyPlayer (a 6'11 rim protector who plays like Nikola Jokic on offense), and I'm ready to review the game. I probably could have reviewed it weeks ago, but it feels better to wait until games are complete before reviewing them, just in case I have any additional insights.
NBA 2K19 is the most recent iteration of my favorite basketball game series of all time. It's another reskinned and roster updated version of the exact same game as when I last played it, which was NBA 2K16. This isn't quite fair, but it's closer than saying it's a brand new game.
There is a new story mode for both owners and MyPlayer, which I generally preferred to the Spike Lee joint from 16. The story in these games usually follows a pretty standard formula-get drafted, overcome squabbles with teammates and family, and reach NBA super stardom. This one is pretty close to that, but with a compelling wrinkle. What if you didn't get drafted at all? The game, rather than starting in college or high school, starts with you in China, learning the hard lessons of how to make it to the NBA in a foreign environment. I thought the story was pretty good.
It is somewhat strange that you have to be online in order to experience the story part of the MyPlayer mode. I could certainly see needing to be online to participate in the Neighborhood part, in which you can play pickup games with other players, recruit players to your team, and play little minigames like dodgeball. But walling a single player experience like MyPlayer off behind an online paywall is pretty nasty, to be honest.
The mechanics are as solid as ever, although there will be at least one guaranteed facepalm "that's not how basketball works" moment in each and every game you play. The most frequent is the old drive into the lane, get stopped and pick up the ball, but rise awkardly for a jump shot after way too long a time moment. It always goes in, and it's always frustrating. You'll also see a ton of 8-10 foot layups from the side angle that would be fiendishly difficult for even the craftiest real life NBA players, but the guys in 2K can them with ease. Anyway.
The game is also not particularly good at approximating the flow of real team offenses or quirky players, which is something that Madden at least tries to do. NBA teams are growing increasingly homogeneous in real life, with a lot of high pick and roll going on, but this game does very little at attempting to highlight those teams with some uniqueness to their game. Where is the 5 out Harden isolation with Capela in the dunker's spot? Why do the Utah Jazz not run anything approximating advantage basketball? Where is the midrange specialty of the San Antonio Spurs? Why do the Denver Nuggets not run their offense through Nikola Jokic? It also messes with the way NBA teams run their rotations, using a more hockey style "line" approach, running a full set of five guys onto the floor in unison, and back off. The Clippers, for example, balance their offense by having Lou Williams and Montrezl Harrell on the bench, enabling them to cobble together above average offense for their whole time on the floor in real life, but in 2K, they're starting.
Player tendencies are even more maddening. I watch very little Philadelphia 76ers basketball, but from what I've seen, Ben Simmons is not a sweet shooting midrange specialist, even though he's swishing them at will in 2K. Joel Embiid, noted from his overpowering back to the basket game, becomes some kind of cross between smooth crafty post operators Kevin McHale and Al Jefferson. Throw in a handful of bizarre ratings (Boogie Cousins is an 89?????), and you have a bit of a weird experience that pulls you out of the immersive experience a bit.
They totally fixed my biggest complaint with 16, which was that you actually had to go to practice to raise your guy's skill caps. Now, performing well in games will increase your skill caps gradually, and it's very well balanced so that you'll always have some aspect of your game to work on, even if you're capped out in some stats. It's kind of weird, though, that you don't get boosts to your scores for attaining career milestones such as making an All-Star team, All-NBA team, etc.
There are still plenty of ways to break this game. The high pick and roll/pop is remarkably broken, and a skilled big like myself can control the game completely through this one action. There are also weird quirks to how the players will always defend a given play that can be exploited through certain passes and moves at a give time, and you'll find ways to break the game that even I didn't.
My biggest concern is with the MyPlayer mode, because that's what I play, but I did fool around with MyTeam and MyGM a bit. MyTeam is microtransaction cash in at the most egregious level, and I hated it. Seriously, if you can build a viable team to compete in this mode without cash, you have an absurd amount of time on your hands. MyGM is a nice franchise mode with a ton of cool new options. It's also pretty easy to break the game here, though, as you'll always get at least a handful of bizarre trade offers if you put a guy in which you're uninterested on the trade block. But on the whole, it's a really fun experience.
The commentary is the best it's ever been from a 2K game, with a hug amount of recorded dialogue from a wide range of commenters, including Kevin Harlan, Chris Webber, David Aldridge, and my beloved Doris Burke. Seriously, if you don't like Doris Burke, you might just be blinded by the fact that she's a woman. There are also a handful of guest commenters like Bill Simmons who will show up in games. I've been playing the game for hundreds of games, and still being surprised by some of the detailed dialogue that they recorded.
All in all, this is still a really good game. Contact sports like basketball and football are just harder to approximate in video form than noncontact sports like baseball, but NBA 2K19 ultimately does a very nice job. Its most frustrating point is the cash grab nature of the game, along with some occasionally wonky physics, but it's been the best basketball game on the market for a very long time, and I spent a ton of time diving back into the world of 2K. I'll give it a 9.0/10.
Up next is a game I'm really enjoying and should be done with far quicker than a month and a half! Check out a little teaser below...
-TRO
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