Review – NBA Live 10 (PS3, X360)

I am not a big fan of basketball. The foul rules seem nonsensical, there are too many timeouts, and there just aren’t enough Steve Nashes and too many Vince Carters. Nonetheless, a videogame of a sport I don’t enjoy watching can still be fun. However, EA Canada hits the rim with NBA Live 10. There are several issues with the gameplay, balance, presentation and enjoyability of the game, despite the fact that it was very clear that EA Canada had put a large amount of effort and love into this title. Let’s start with the good.

The graphics and animation are amazing. Each court’s atmosphere is different and matches their real life counterpart’s lighting, and changes depending on whether you’re playing a regular season game, a playoff game, or a game in the finals. The players look like the people they’re supposed to look like, and when Iglauskas is on the court, his intimidating size discourages you from driving to the basket. The shot and shot block animations are really smooth and impressively contextual. Does your player need to do a spin around or a hook shot to try and score? The game will animate that. The result is that there is a very dynamic and different feel every time you go on offense, and the sheer number of different animations available is entertaining. One of the coolest things about the animation is that when one of your players has an injury, you will be able to tell. Players will limp slightly after a jump shot or Shaq will hold his back after a slam dunk, indicating his ancient back may finally be succumbing.

There are some neat and unique features in this game. An Xbox Live connection will allow you to hear current, real life sports news updates throughout the menu. For example, I was hearing about the afternoon’s baseball game or football games while navigating the menus. However, this feature is disabled in the Dynasty mode menus and instead you are forced to listen to the various hip hop songs on the EA Trax. During free throws, your controller will start shaking to try to affect your performance if you’re in an opposing stadium and the fans are into the game. However, a successful first free throw will quiet them down and stop the shaking. An internet connection allows you to update the game’s rosters and stats according to their real life counterparts. Are the Toronto Raptors on a hot streak? Your game will reflect that. The Dynamic Season mode will reflect the current 2009-2010 NBA Season, except for the games you play. So instead of simulating the games, it will download the results. Dynasty Mode will let you take a customizable franchise through multiple seasons, similar to those found in other sports games, and has surprising depth such as hiring staff that can be upgraded, Madden-like drill modes to improve your players, and drafting. Multiplayer modes include a single player versus, team play, and even creating a five man squad for the Adidas Live leagues. Players earn skill levels for winning games and the matchmaking will try to match equally skilled players when playing online. Another feature new to this year’s NBA Live is that you can choose the atmosphere of the game amoung regular season, playoffs, and finals. Each option will change the lighting, opening presentation, and crowd involvement. This game actually does have a lot to offer for those interested in playing it throughout the season.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where all the good things stop. The sound in the game is repetitive and unexciting. The announcers are fairly realistic but they repeat the same sound clip way too often. At the beginning of every game, they will talk about how the opposing team has to stop Steve Nash if they hope to win. The sound clips that reveal some information about a particular player are fairly neat. For example, they will talk about Nash’s soccer background and how that might have helped him with some aspects of the game. I ended up turning off the announcers after a few games though, due to the annoying repetition. The actual sounds are pretty much what you expect, including squeeky sneakers and athletic groans.

The gameplay and gameplay balance is where I have the biggest beef. Like every game, there are some minor AI issues. Things such as being called for goaltending when defending a dunk are silly, but players should also not be allowed to pass into the back court, thus causing a violation, especially since you can’t see the half court line when you’re in the offensive half. A pass to the outside man at the corner almost always results in an intercepted pass instead of your player moving to receive the pass. Then there are the more major issues. EA has put in a very easy playcalling controls. Pressing the left bumper will bring up some plays you can run, which focuses around one of your players. Then the AI will move that player into a position and then you press A to pass them the ball and try to run the play. Varied playcalling is important as the AI seems to punish repeated attempts, but running an offense is actually frustrating because if you try to shoot with anyone even in your vicinity, you will miss. They don’t even have to be trying to block or challenge the shot, they just have to be around, and that drastically lowers your chance of scoring, even if you’re only a few feet away from the basket. This is fine until you run into someone online who chooses a good three point shooting team. All they have to do is continuously attempt three pointers and they will likely win because it’s so hard to score inside where defenders will always be around. In one match that I played online, the Nuggets had a 43% 3-point shooting percentage. I had about the same success driving to the hoop, so that didn’t quite work out for me. In the end I actually had more fun playing single player than online as all these gameplay balance issues were exposed. Also, much like real life, some players can’t be guarded. Try to double team Lebron James? It doesn’t matter. I’ve also had many games where Steve Nash had 80% of my team’s points.

Some other flaws that I encountered were more minor. There is the lack of a serpentine draft option in order to make the fantasy draft more fair. The game takes forever to load anything, especially the opening menu when you start the game. It seems that this is because it first loads this sandbox mode where you can choose from several All Star players and play around with the controls, but I would rather have the game load faster. There is no option to turn off the TV presentation options such as automatic replays or the Sprite sponsored highlight packages.

NBA Live 10 certainly received some loving treatment from EA Canada. And because of this attention, it was very difficult for me to be so negative about it. The atmosphere, graphical presentation, and plethora of options in the game are all well done and does a great job of making the player feel like they’re playing a real NBA game. Unfortunately, some of the gameplay and balance issues break the immersion and results in a frustrating experience.

Note: If you are thinking of picking up this game used, you will lose all the Dynamic DNA features that download the real season stats and results from the real season. You have to make an EA account and a one-time code associates the game to that account.You will still be able to listen to up-to-date sports news and play online.