NBA 2K20 Review

There is only 1 word that I can think of after playing NBA 2K20, and that is, disappointing. It is basically a more relevant NBA 2K19 with a few bells and whistles.

Let’s start by talking about the graphics. Visually the game is as you would expect, pretty damn good. Everything is smooth and runs pretty much how it’s supposed to. The actual gameplay doesn’t really have many faults either apart from things feeling slow and sluggish when you first start in Mycareer but that is a separate issue. There really isn’t much wrong with the graphics or gameplay, where the game falls down is in game modes like Mycareer, and features.

Firstly the game hasn’t really changed and let me explain what I mean when i say that. I mean really all that has changed is the content, things like up to date teams etc, WNBA features like players and teams and such, the way you make your character has been revamped, you choose position, style, athleticism, and then you also choose how high the cap is on your abilities from a set amount of points. Even though I can see what they were going for I’m not entirely sure it hit the mark, THAT’S IT. I mean yeah you have a new story for mycareer, but after that it goes back to the same old “neighbourhood” and when I say the same, I mean almost spitting image. It’s like they just gave up on trying new things in the neighbourhood, i became boring very quickly.

Mycareer on the other hand has become nothing but a pay to win feature, so much so that if you don’t fork out money, you find yourself grinding through games and training for hours trying to level your player up and even then it won’t mean a damn thing. Badges and Virtual Currency is what it is all about these days. Now even though I love the idea of badges, they have quickly become way too important, so that if you don’t have the badge it doesn’t matter where your ability is at, you won’t be that good. They were intended for players to add a specialisation to their characters, to slightly increase abilities, like deep range 3’s, Corner 3’s, finishing a dunk, being able to alley oop with more consistency, play better defense. But now it has become the be all and end all. How do you get badges you ask? Well now, you have to do things in the game which fills a bar under separate sections like playmaking, defense, shooting and finishing. When the bar fills, you get to add 1 tier of a single badge in that grouping, oh and how many tiers do the badges have? bronze, silver, gold and hall of fame. 

So when it takes several games to fill 1 bar imagine how much gameplay you have to go through to get the badges. 

So here is the problem, you have to have the badges to be good to fill up your bar to then get badges, it’s a vicious cycle. Not to mention the fact that your character is incredibly slow and sluggish when you first start it’s ridiculous, however you can’t increase your physical stats, which is incredibly annoying. You only increase as your character levels up which means you have to endure heaps of frustrating games and slowly increase it. MyCareer gets you angry and annoyed in order to suck you into buying virtual currency to level your player up. I admit I got sucked in once and do you know what it did? Basically nothing. I was slightly better physically but still slow and sluggish. I leveled my 3pt ability to 80 and still had a lot of trouble shooting from 3 even if I got a perfect or damn near perfect release. Like I said it angers you into buying virtual currency and even then you get a tiny improvement, ridiculous. 

Now I know that not everyone is like me, when I buy a sports game, the main thing I look for is the my career option. This NBA 2K release lost me, I spent more time on NBA 2K16 than I have on this one, I have spent the least amount of time on this game compared to every other NBA 2K game to date. Today I find myself playing NBA 2K11 more than NBA 2K20, now what does that say about 2K20 when I would rather play a game made 9 years before it?   

Review by Dillon Vander Putten