If someone had asked me over the past few years which big annual sports game offered the best value for money each year, I would probably have said NBA 2K.
That’s not a ringing endorsement — unless you’re interested in whatever minor tweaks are on offer, you can usually skip at least a year or two of the game, or skip the competition in the handball or soccer business, without really missing out on much. But in a genre where the sheer volume and depth of content designed to make you play sports in every way is king, NBA 2K feels like LeBron if he kept trying to sell you fake money.
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NBA 2K25 is just as big as its infamous predecessor, taking up about 133GB on my PC, which is about the same as Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3, both of which are notoriously large. What you get after giving up all that hard drive space is not a sports game, but several smaller games combined into one giant mecha sports game. It’s like telling Shaquille, Kobe, and Phil Jackson to stand on each other’s shoulders.
What is a real basketball game like, you might ask? Well, I’ll answer that. There are tons of new ProPLAY animations that make moves like shooting feel more fluid and realistic by having your movements mimic those of real players. There’s also a new dribbling engine that does more of the above, and also allows you to transition directly from your signature dribble to a pop-up shot in one animation.
On defense, players can cut off their opponents’ attacks simply by swinging their stick at the right time. Each adjustment adds something, but it’s more about making an already very dynamic experience feel more refined and smoother rather than completely different. The addition of Learn 2K, a tutorial mode that guides you from the basics to how to use these new additions in the game, is a smart move in terms of accessibility, and there are similar features that guide people through the basics of MyTeam and The City, which can definitely be daunting to newcomers.
As far as modes go, I’ll start with the big one, which is actually three modes: MyPlayer/MyCareer and The City – the open-world space that’s the stage for your usual single-player “establish yourself as an NBA star” experience, as well as a whole host of online and non-online activities surrounding it.
This year’s city is visually interesting, a place where you can play basketball, hang out, or speed around in a go-kart, ramming into pedestrians you desperately want to run over. It’s also a fever dream that’s hard to describe to any of your friends who don’t play 2K without sounding a little weird.
Take this year’s new Proving Grounds. It’s basically a Roman Colosseum with Michael Jordan’s face on the side. You go in, and you can play some multiplayer basketball games that are more competitive and higher ranked than the ones you play in other buildings in the city. Because nothing says serious competition like having an actual tiger in the stands trying to miss a layup, like if you lose, the Frosties guys are coming out to dunk on you.
To be honest, a lot of the other things you can do in the game and in Cities and the places you can visit are endearing to me if it weren’t for the fact that the game has been so ham-fisted with microtransactions in the past that this kind of thing feels a bit like the gaudy window dressing you’d see on the Las Vegas Strip. The same goes for the new hangouts for the two online factions you can join–the Elite and the Rising–who call home a bay with a full-size pirate ship and a factory where mechs are being built, just for the sake of cool.
The reintroduction of customizable courts in player apartments is a positive, but the new squad finder tool was a bit useless the few times I tried to use it to find people to play with, especially as you always run into random players who are generally willing to do whatever the place you’re headed to offers.
The MyCareer experience itself (you know, the part where you play in the NBA through the arenas in The City) is fine. While there are cutscenes, it’s kept minimalist and straight into the action, as Heart of a Dynasty (the element that tells the backstory of how your player got into the league) seems optional. It’s linear, but offers some high school and international games for those who want extra story, and offers nice rewards.
Finally, 2K aims to refine the process of choosing your initial MyPlayer builds so that you can use them to participate in all of these activities. Admittedly, I’ve always been a bit basic in this regard—give me a 6-foot-8 small forward who can do a little bit of everything in terms of scoring, and I’m happy—but hopefully the pro-tuned build mechanics can help those seeking something a little different. So far, I haven’t had time to build my player enough to definitively tell whether I ended up with a better build than usual, or unlocked a lot of new takeovers and badges to play with, but I had a lot of fun with the ones I did play.
Now, with all that out of the way – MyTeam. I found the card-collecting modes I played to be OK, and things like the new Breakout and Triple Threat Park modes, which offer short games using the players you’ve collected, were actually pretty good, and even though this mode isn’t usually my first choice, it still appealed to me.
The duel games are just your run-of-the-mill online duels, and it would have been nice to see a better idea of how they fit into the new “King of the Court” weekend challenges, but unfortunately, no matches of the latter have been scheduled in my time playing so far.
As for how the return of the auction house and the introduction of a reputation system designed to last year-round affects the economy and the long-term prospects of the mode, we’ll have to wait and see, but as I made my way through the first three tiers, I seemed to be having a distinct difficulty with the latter.
Moving on to the W, this is the WNBA element that NBA 2K has been focusing on for the past few years, and despite some substantial improvements, I still have mixed feelings about it. As always, I’m glad it’s been included in 2K, but the implementation still feels banished to a corner that’s underdeveloped compared to the rest of the game. It has its own MyPlayer mode and online features, but both are much smaller in scale and still don’t feel fully integrated with the cities or any of the accompanying elements.
I know there might be some companies that are blocking it, but wouldn’t it be hard to make it happen to let you run around a city as a WNBA player and let you use its arenas to develop your career? Come on, there’s a building with Caitlin Clark’s face on it waiting to be built, especially since the move to put A’ja Wilson and Jayson Tatum on equal footing on at least one game cover has been made.
I saved my favorite recent installment of NBA 2K for last. For the past few years, MyNBA Eras has been my primary mode for playing 2K. In addition to doing something I’ve never seen another sports game do — allowing you to play through roughly three decades of alternate league history in franchise mode, perfect for those who love what-ifs — it offers nearly every customization feature you could want.
But this year, it feels like there’s more to lose than to gain. In addition to the established three decades and the modern era, there’s a new era, but it’s an odd choice. The Stephen Curry era kicks off with the 2016-17 season, which oddly splits the 2010s (the LeBron era began around 2011) in two while delaying the modern era to now, rather than starting around 2020.
While I have a lot of respect for Curry’s Warriors, I don’t think the league has changed enough uniquely at this point in history that you can classify it as part of the modern era to warrant this being its own separate era. It doesn’t take anything away from the mode, but it does feel a little unnecessary. What’s taken away from the mode is something that the developers at NBA 2K probably can’t do anything to help.
I’m guessing that due to rights negotiations or denials, several important players who were crucial to the league’s landscape during the Curry era are currently not present in 2K25, despite starring in previous 2Ks. John Wall, Blake Griffin, and Andre Iguodala are the chief among them, the latter of whom was very important to the Warriors dynasty itself. Thankfully, they will inevitably be added via custom rosters, but it’s still suboptimal.
Our last stop is the relaunched MyGM, which is pretty bland. There’s an attempt to make it feel a bit like an RPG, but it feels as shallow as any previous attempts at this sort of thing. You can build a GM with specific traits, which is cool, but going the charisma route, I found myself able to talk myself out of most of the goals that team staff and players tried to set for me. The dialogue can also get a bit repetitive–at the start of two consecutive seasons, Cade Cunningham demanded that he be traded if I didn’t promise him that we’d win.
I even encountered a Jedi mind trick joke and a dialogue about dreams that I’m fairly certain I remember from the previous GM mode in some form, though I haven’t double-checked. It’s a worthy mode, but with Eras coming along, this revamp doesn’t do enough to stop it from feeling a bit like an afterthought.
Overall, there’s still a lot of fun stuff to be had in NBA 2K25, and I still think it’s good enough to keep the series as a market leader – especially now that a next-gen version has finally arrived on PC. However, it has enough issues that I don’t think it’s a positive step forward, even if you definitely can’t call it a remake of last year’s game.
It’s a massive enough game that you’ll have more than enough to do even if you only stick to one or two of your favorite modes, but if 2K’s strength is the entire massive package, then it’s set the goal of being king in every area, and I don’t think NBA 2K25 quite achieves that just yet.
NBA 2k25 is released on September 6 for PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X/S/Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch. This review was conducted on PC with a code provided by the publisher.
