The UI is mostly snappy with my only major complaint being that it is a little too busy. You can play every game yourself, you can be more of a hands-on coach with the Simcast option, or you can just quickly simulate most of the season. Playing through a season is enjoyable, especially because you have so many options of how to handle it. Aside from the fact that this mode suffers from some of the problems with the modern NBA (as in, there are a few superteams that dominate everything), it’s deep and fun. The place I first went after a few exhibition matches was the MyLeague mode, which allows you to take over a team and take it through multiple seasons, including dealing with contracts, free agency, and the draft over the offseason. It unfortunately shares the predilection for microtransactions with other platforms, which is a gigantic blemish on this otherwise excellent game. The load times are a little long, which leads to a little too much downtime in some modes (though other systems appear to have similarly long load times), but the Switch doesn’t feel like it made many compromises. The port here is tremendous, with graphics looking great off the TV and totally fine in HD on the TV. The only things that take this down a notch on Switch aren’t really even a Switch-created problem. Part of me longs for a more arcade basketball experience, but even that can be found in smaller forms in the Blacktop modes that allow for street games lesser than traditional five-on-five. Thankfully, easier difficulty levels and a functional tutorial system made it simpler to learn the sport, how to execute plays, and how to make use of the variety of control options and inputs. My background in the genre is in NBA Jam/Street and ‘90s NBA Live, so a lot of the complexities took a while for me to grasp.

After finding my footing amongst the sea of modes and options, I found an excellent basketball game that runs very well on Nintendo’s hybrid system and is only held back by some bloat and gross microtransactions.įor starters, the basketball gameplay is versatile and deep. Booting it up for the first time as someone lapsed to the franchise was positively overwhelming.

NBA 2K19, the second entry in the respected basketball franchise on Switch, is huge.

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