The life of a sports game reviewer can be a miserable one, but while much of Visual Concepts’ culturally colossal NBA 2K series is recycled year-on-year, it rarely settles for raw iteration. This is a developer that, for all its faults, genuinely appears committed to creating the best sports sim on the market – and it tends to lap its competitors through sheer budget alone.
NBA 2K25 subscribes to that sentiment, offering another enormous package that genuinely improves on previous games in meaningful areas – even if it feels like the franchise’s same old flaws will never be addressed. So, before we even dig deeper, we may as well come right out and say it: the microtransactions are as egregious as ever, and the live service grind will yet again consume your soul.
Still, this year’s game does appear to be a little more respectful of your time. While we enjoyed the idea of previous releases capturing every aspect of basketball culture, The City ultimately got bogged down with rapping minigames, catwalks, and pointless side-quests. This year proceedings have been streamlined, putting a strong emphasis on the thing that matters most: the basketball.
There is a campaign which depicts your player’s back-story: you’ll play college games and progress to the FIBA World Cup, before getting starting with an NBA team. But you can actually skip these flashbacks if you want to focus on your professional career and complete them at any time, so there’s a level of flexibility here which has been missing in previous games.
The City, the sandbox-style social hub where you can compete against others online, has also been reduced in size, removing the tedious emphasis on running about. A beach-style arcade houses all of the various shops and malls you’ve come to expect from the franchise, and it’s here you can use hard-earned in-game currency to purchase cosmetics like new sneakers and shirts. There are also a couple of minigames, like a go-kart track, which sprinkle in a little variety.
But mostly, it’s been pared back in a positive way: the focus has been placed on getting you to your single player matches or competing online. There’s even a sprinkling of balance now, unheard of in previous releases: you’ll match against players of a similar ability with a comparatively specced player, which reduces the likelihood of total blowouts that occurred in the past.
This means, while you will still need to grind or spend real-money on VC to upgrade your player, you can at least compete against opponents at a similar level, which is welcome. Obviously, as we alluded to above, the emphasis on microtransactions completely undermines the entire experience – but publisher 2K Sports is clearly making unfathomable sums of money from it, and thus it’s never going to change. Until it does, there’ll be a cap to the review scores this series can achieve.
It’s a shame because the basketball is once again outstanding. Visual Concepts has re-written the entire dribbling system, and there’s a je ne sais quoi to it this year which just feels right – even if we can’t exactly put into words why. This pairs nicely with an upgrade to the ProPLAY animation engine, which takes real-world NBA footage and incorporates it into the game.
Real-life players feel like they have more personality than ever before, accentuated by their “go-to” shots, which gives dozens of superstars a “special move”. Perhaps more than any other sport, basketball is all about the individuality of its players, and that’s captured better than ever in this year’s game – even though we feel more could be added to this area in future instalments.
This really is a hulking beast of a game, though. MyNBA Eras – the game’s single player Franchise mode which allows you to take control of a team through different periods of NBA history – has been expanded with a more contemporary Steph Curry arc, and while this lacks the unique flavour of previous eras, it does give plenty of incentive to start a new playthrough.
Meanwhile, the WNBA, in the age of Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, continues to grow in importance across the release. While the single player mode The W still doesn’t have quite the same scope as its male player alternative, the inclusion of press conferences give you a little more opportunity to define your created rookie’s personality.
We didn’t spend a whole heap of time in Ultimate Team alternative MyTEAM this year, but as largely solo players, we quite liked the new format for 3v3 matches, which sees you taking on different opponents in a board game-style environment in order to win in-game prizes. As always, all these modes will be updated across the entire year with new content and events.
And we’d be remiss not to mention the presentation before rounding out this review. Yet again, NBA 2K25 is so far ahead of the competition it beggars belief, with motion captured half-time shows and in-stadium performances, like cheerleader routines. The pace can feel a bit slow when all you want to do is throw some hoops, but it’s hard not to marvel at the sheer variety of all the different flourishes and features.
Conclusion
By daring to downscale some of the fluff, NBA 2K25 brings its focus back to basketball in a positive way. Improvements to the series’ dribbling system and ProPLAY make this the best feeling hoops sim Visual Concepts has made, while the sheer density of different modes and features means you could play nothing else all year – and still never get bored. But the borderline insulting emphasis on microtransactions remain a thorn in this series’ side, and something you simply have to accept if you want to enjoy everything else on offer here.