My NBA Player
One of the main ways to play is of course to get your own player, play in the Rookie Showcase and try to get drafted as high as you can with a team you will succeed with. I managed to get drafted 12th in the first round.
Once you’re drafted you get some face time with press, which becomes an ongoing thing after every game. The thing about that is what you say affects your approval ratings and team dynamics. However, it’s very sketchy. It’s like they took the idea and half-ass crammed it into the game instead of fleshing it out. I think F1 2011 did it best and this is a poorer implementation of living the pro player lifestyle. What they needed to do was give you a better idea of what each reply to questions would do instead of just giving you a basic sentence that then gets expanded into something you probably didn’t plan on having the player say. Really, it’s just not that great or complex and everything is very unpredictable.
Gameplay is good but somewhat lacking as well. There are a lot of controls and remembering all of them when coming into the game as a new player is cumbersome. They are broken into basic and advanced, but if you want to really hit your goals each game, you have to have a masterful control over what you’re doing and that’s pretty hard when first starting out. On top of that, you might only get 10 minutes of play time in which to make those goals.
One of the goals is usually player performance. Things like passing, shooting, good off ball play all affect this. However, there’s no place to go and get an idea of what each does really. Sure, a bad shot will make it go down, but how much. A pass to assist or an assist will make it go up, but again, how much?
All of this adds up to a game that has so many unknown variables it’s almost impossible to calculate how to get better ratings. So then you are forced to try and forget about that stuff and just go play well.
But sometimes playing well is hard. Particularly because there was no real tutorial on how to use the controls and play the game. In fact, the game manual is just four pages. Simply a list of controls. Plus the controls feel sort of sluggish at times and the player often seems to do things that you weren’t trying to make them do. I swear I have seen my guy going in the wrong direction or doing something when I just wanted him to stand where he was.
