NBA 2K10 Review

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NBA 2K10 is  the latest installment in what some people consider to be the best basketball franchise out there. This year the guys at Visual Concepts tried a lot of different things and to be honest some of them worked and some of them didn’t. On the other hand though they must be commended on trying to bring real innovation and change to a formula that they probably could have just renamed and resold all over again.

Crews

This year in NBA 2K10 all the rage is probably going to be about Crews and who has the best one. This feature similar to clans in shooters is a great one, where it pits you and your crew against other crews from all over to prove who is actually the best. In theory, the concept was great but there have been a few issues with the implementation. First, it was supposed to match you up according to how many user controlled players the other people had so that you would never play more human players than you had but it doesn’t do that. At this point I am not sure if it does that and can’t find an exact match, it just matches you against the next reasonable candidate. While I may have no problem playing with only 2 guys versus a team with all 5 players I would like to have some notification that this is about to happen vice seeing it and then having to back out.

My next issue with Crews is that once you go to join your crew you are prompted as to whether you would like to load your “My Player”. The roster for crews are determined by what NBA team’s roster you base your Crew on, so for instance I have the Lakers. So you set up a game and there is no way to know before you start the game that the other team is using some of their created players. Again, I have no problem with this if you give the player proper notification so they can decide whether they want to play the other team or not. People work hard on their players, but if I have to cover a created Center who is 7’2 and has 80 speed with just about any center on the game other than Dwight Howard you are going to be in trouble.

This happens a lot, when you just get out matched by a created player at a position like C or SF and they basically abuse you the whole game. I don’t mind getting beat by a team that’s better than me, but at least let me know what I am up against before I start the game. You should be able to filter out certain things before you play, so let’s say I don’t want to play teams with created players or teams that don’t have the same amount of human players as I do and if there are no matching results so be it, but let me decide. The bigger issue here is that it draws the whole ranking system into question, how can one team say they are better than another if one uses created “My Players” and the other one doesn’t, it’s not fair. Either you have two separate rankings or you don’t allow teams that have “My Players” on them to be ranked.

Those criticisms are in relation to how the feature is configured not with the feature itself. Crews are awesome, you get  the same adrenaline rush in a close game that you would get in any Call of Duty match. We had a double OT victory over a team that had me about to throw my controller. The feature itself is very promising and hopefully they will continue to refine it next year or maybe even this year with patches.