A reader offers his verdict on 2K’s best-selling basketball game and explains why he likes it despite Spike Lee’s career mode. NBA 2K16 is a deep, complicated and realistic basketball simulator. It is challenging and requires patience and dedication to be a competent player. I thought the preceding statement was true when speaking of previous entries in the series, but it turns out they could, and did, take it up a number of levels. This is Spinal Tap, welcome to eleven. You can play with friends in either of these modes against other players, and your performance can grant you in-game rewards (accessories like headbands, arm sleeves, etc.) and My Park rep, which is doled out depending on your team's success and your individual play.

 

For all of the hype surrounding NBA 2K16’s revamped MyCareer mode, it seems downright shocking that Visual Concepts would forget the most exciting part of its signature mode. Sure, the latest iteration of the number one basketball simulation in the world is still mechanically sound, loaded with features that will keep NBA fans busy for months and fun to play, but letting Spike Lee have such a large role may have been a mistake. While there is a level of intrigue that comes with playing a Spike Lee Joint as opposed to watching one, the best part of MyCareer came from the childlike wonder players experience when they live out their personal NBA dream. Instead of having a sense of agency over the proceedings, players will find that MyCareer feels a bit more like Spike’s Career.

 

NBA 2K16 still feels like the best basketball game in the world, though this year’s version feels like this series’ first hiccup in quite some time. At its lowest point, the story can feel like it’s fighting with the game’s interactivity. For instance, during the small portions of pro basketball games you play during MyCareer, you might score nothing and get a grade of D-. Despite that, you’re still dubbed a superstar in Lee’s narrative. So MyCareer often seems eerily separate from the main game itself. The rest of this NBA simulation with lifelike graphics has coaching choices galore (perhaps too many), varied online play and artificial intelligence that foils you when you choose to do the same thing again and again. Few such options are prevalent in the story.

 

Your created character starts out as a high school phenom, before choosing his college and eventually being drafted into the NBA itself. It’s realistic in some ways, but what’s disappointing is that you only get to make one choice, and that’s when you pick said college. Many of the cutscenes, through dialogue, emphasize how it’s all about your choice, but the game never gives you the option to make said choice. Hell, even the marketing slogan for this Spike Lee joint was “Be the story.” Every other game mode has also been reworked in one way or another. Luckily my career mode saves were still okay, but it was rather frustrating to continually be prompted to confirm my email address, date of birth and redesign my player’s head every time, as the servers had decided that I had never done that before. Here’s hoping that gets fixed in an upcoming patch.

 

Which is also true for some of the common complaints of the series. Facial scanning is still hit and miss. Using the Kinect to scan my ugly mug into this game was a tiresome process that even when it did finally work, didn’t work all that well. Then, there’s the growing ire from the 2K community that the My Player and My Team progression is so closely tied to micro-transactions. You have only a couple of options here, grind the many modes of NBA 2K to earn coins to boosts your statistics, or just buy them. With the option to essentially purchase stats for your character, trying to earn said points instead of buying them puts you way behind the curve in terms of player development. It doesn’t feel entirely unfair, and there are plenty of ways to do it, it’s just incredibly time consuming. For players with jobs and more going on in their lives, there really is no option other than to just purchase the VC coins.

 

All of these things combine to overcome Spike Lee’s disappointing turn at the helm of MyCareer. Give credit to the franchise for daring to do something different and new, even if it did fail. Because everywhere else, NBA 2K16 passes with flying colors. You’ll love this game.