Recent reviews by JayC

I think the best way to do this is a pro and con list:

Pros
- Hard foul animations are actually pretty good
- Transition fouls are more realistic to the nba game, they're hard and prevent the layup and are pretty common in a 1 v 1 fastbreak
- Players under the rim are fairly contested, in previous 2ks they could kind of just shoot layups with a lean and it would seem uncontested, this makes offence rebounds and put-backs more realistic

Cons
- Transition defence is completely broken. If you miss a shot, there's a very good chance they can just throw a full court pass for an open layup. This happened to me literally up to half of my missed shots being uncontested fast breaks. Even if you do have a defender back, the controls are so clunky that if you're not perfectly placed (which is luck because where they start is based on the computer) you can't even contest players, let alone stop them.

-Play calling: Often you will call a play and it simply just won't happen. The player will set a screen nowhere near your man, or just not at all. Half the time they do set an off ball screen (so CPU controlled) it's an illegal screen, which you can do nothing about. For some reason they added an extra button to call plays which is just bad for quality of life, such as late shot clock situations, wanting a screen from a specific player etc.

- Defence is incredibly clunky and players are very slow to change direction. When quick player gets by (which obviously happens irl so that's not an issue in itself) there is no help defence at all or two defenders will come and it's just an easy bucket. On screens the CPU will often make a dumb play, like double a non 3 point shooter, switch into a terrible mismatch, or just let the roller have an open layup and just stand still.

- Offence Star players struggle to deal with minimal pressure at the rim if they're not locked in to one of the favourable animations. Players like Shaq struggle to finish over defenders like Iverson for example. Over a foot and 100 lbs difference and one foot from the rim it's a 50/50. Spacing is terrible. Eg. If you call for a screen on the left wing and theres someone in the left corner, they will rise to the FT line extended and then not set a screen. So you have the ball handler, the screener, and just a random dude all within a couple of feet of each other.

-Servers - Still broken. Playable, but expect 2 second freezes up to 5 times a minute. Disconnects also once in a while.

Finally - why is this not the next gen version on PC? PC has much higher capacity for graphics than a console, so there is no reason why 2k should not have released the next gen version here. The gameplay and this lead me to the conclusion that 2k simply will not make fundamentally sound changes to their game, even if they are essential for a good basketball game until people stop buying it. I hope that there is some competition from other companies in the future.

2k Servers remain terrible. DC'd from first 3 games on play now. Also they tried to fix gameplay by reducing sprint speeds - while the idea is good and you can't just blow by players, even athletic freaks now feel incredibly sluggish. I imagine they'll fix this in upcoming patches, but for now this game is not worth buying.