I didn’t expect to like NBA Live 19 as much as I did. It’s not without its flaws, that’s for sure, but the actual basketball that takes place on its court feels and looks great.

NBA Live 18 for Xbox One game reviews & Metacritic score: NBA LIVE 18 introduces THE ONE, a new, dynamic career experience centered on your player, your choices and your legacy. Create your unique player identity and d. NBA Live 18, EA Sports' 2017/18 entry in its popular b-ball franchise, introduces THE ONE, an all-new, dynamic career experience centered on your player, your choices and your legacy.

It even has some inventive modes, such as a surprisingly entertaining tower-defense style court battle, alongside the money-hungry Ultimate Team mode that’s become a staple of every EA Sports game. But while it feels like a fluid and realistic game of hoops, it also comes up short in the personality department, which allows a lot of potential excitement to slip through its fingers.Player models look the part of their real-life counterparts, to the point where they’re instantly recognizable — there’s no mistaking Aron Baynes and his manbun for another player.

Live 19 also brings back the WNBA players that were introduced in last year’s game and adds the inclusive ability to create a female basketball avatar just like you can with the men. They’re even better in motion. Animations are powered by the same system used in Madden NFL 19 and FIFA 19, and I have to say they look better than those in NBA 2K18. Players jockey for position, bump into each other and weave through defenders realistically. It gives them real weight and fluidity of movement. Everything involving close contact in NBA Live 19 works well, and specific player animations, like LeBron James’ aggressive lane-driving dribbles, are spot-on.

Control the CourtOn the court, Live’s control scheme instantly makes sense. The path that appears between your player and the one you’re aiming at makes passing hard to mess up, which leads to fewer frustrating moments like accidentally throwing to a heavily-defended player, leading to a turnover. There aren’t any surprises.

Shooting, too, is simple and intuitive; pulling off a dunk instead of a layup is as easy as holding down the trigger while shooting near the basket. I definitely felt like I knew what I was doing right away. As simple as the controls are, NBA Live 19 has more in-depth moves available to take your game to the next level once you’ve internalized the fundamentals. An excellent training mode teaches basic and advanced moves, almost like a fighting game. I felt like a complete boss when I successfully dribbled behind the back of a defender in training, then I went back and replayed it again to master it. Fancy handles aren’t required, but I love being able to visit the training mode to work on improving my game at any time. But NBA basketball is as much about culture as it is about the game, and that’s probably Live 19’s weakest showing.

The whole presentation feels like a collection of pieces that all fit together but never quite gel into a whole. Music, shoes, street hoops, and even Stephen A. Smith’s shouting are all part of NBA Live 19, but overall it feels sterile.

Much of that sterility comes from the sound design. Court battles have a single looping song – closer to a raw beat than a fully realized track – and aside from a few shouts for picks and other player noises it’s underwhelming in how subdued a typical game feels. That isn’t helped at all by the fact that Franchise mode, where games look as much like television broadcasts as possible, has extremely limited commentary. Canned snippets repeat during individual games, and the large percentage of them are enormously broad generalizations that sometimes only match the action in the most basic way. When a defender intentionally fouls to stop the clock in the last minute or so of the fourth quarter and the commentary treats it like any other intentional foul without acknowledging the strategy behind it, it’s an unignorable reminder that the lights may be on but there’s nobody home. “It’s too bad NBA Live 19 shoots wide on b-ball culture because there are some really fun alternate modes here.

I especially liked the Court Battle mode, which creatively introduces tower defense elements to a basketball game. You create your own custom court, a process I enjoyed immensely thanks to generous and sometimes ridiculous floor decor options. My personal court looks straight out of a 1990’s Nickelodeon game show, and I love it.

From there, there’s an alluring process of setting your home team and customizing the court rule set before going to work with your away team. Each time I started up, I’d get points for my team successfully defending my court, and taking over other players’ courts unlocks more players, uniforms, court customization options, and more. The weird rule sets, like making dunks worth 5 points, changes up the strategy with every battle.

It’s far and away my favorite mode in NBA Live 19. EA’s Ultimate Team mode returns to NBA Live 19. I understand companies need to make money, but Live Ultimate Team isn’t going to be the way I spend my cash. The rewards for playing are way too small and the cost for NBA Points to buy new packs is designed in an infuriating way.

Packs are in multiples of 100 but points can only be bought in multiples of 150, so unless you spend twice what you might want to spend, you end up with 50 left-over points. Mercifully, microtransactions play a diminished role in the rest of Live’s many modes, so if you aren’t into building a dream team through LUT, you can skip them entirely.

VerdictI was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked playing NBA Live 19. The core basketball game and its various modes offer plenty of chances to have a fun basketball experience. The new animation system makes action on the court look and act more realistic than ever, and a robust training mode gives plenty of opportunity to improve. Unfortunately, lifeless, canned commentary and little in the way of capturing the feel of basketball culture holds NBA Live 19 back.

In the world of basketball games, it’s the Eastern Conference to 2K’s Western Conference – good, but at the end of the season, the odds are heavily in the opponent’s favor.

Everything that takes place between the hoops in a basketball game has a certain fluidity to it. Whether it’s James Harden rocketing past defenders in a fast break or LeBron James backing down a defender in the post, this is a game of style. And even though NBA Live 18 fails to establish a versatile set of modes to sustain interest, it’s able to mimic basketball’s style, fluidity, and intensity.Relative to other NBA games, Live 18’s controls are pretty simplified, and it didn’t take longer than a game or two to get the hang of things. If a player hits the lane at full speed you can expect them to throw down a dunk or layup without more than a button press on your part. If you want to pull up for a three-pointer, the player will do just that, too.

This grants a certain feeling of control over their motion, but once they’re in the air, they’ve also got minds of their own. Past that, NBA Live 18 won’t throw many surprises at you. Once you’ve pressed the command to do something, the players execute it. Things get a little more complicated when dribbling.Things get a little more complicated when dribbling, which uses the right analog stick for things like crossovers and spin moves. Even then, the moves don’t take very long to master and provide more of a sense of command over the players. If you’re able to get a handle on the right stick movements, you can eventually turn the dribble moves into fade-away shots, spin-back jumpers or floaters close to the basket.Unfortunately, the lack of animations in NBA Live 18 prevent any kind of real transition game from taking place. Instead of players dealing with the contact and finding a way around it, they’ll stop in their tracks, halting any realistic momentum.

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It also results in some frustrating tendencies, like players losing the ball at the first sign of contact. There are other issues, too, including players frequently shooting from just inside the three-point line instead of taking a single step back for the extra point, pick-and-rolls being hard to execute, and tip-ins always working without ever missing.Guys like James Harden especially resemble their real-life counterparts.NBA Live 18 does a pretty good job of capturing the real-life feeling of some of the NBA’s biggest stars, though. For instance, it’s no problem to pull up in transition or blow past defenders with Russell Westbrook. Similarly, bigs like Andre Drummond can easily bully potential rebounders and create space in the post. And, unlike in, most of the players actually look like themselves this time.

Guys like James Harden especially resemble their real-life counterparts.The presentation is downhill from there, however. The commentary begins to loop after just a handful of games and contains impressively boring back and forth between the analysts and the play-by-play announcer. By the sixth or seventh time Jeff Van Gundy told me about my poor execution I was looking the fastest way to mute him and his colleagues. There is a nice little ESPN graphic that helps track player stats throughout a game, but that’s about all we get in regards to context of the game. The rest of NBA Live 18’s presentation is noticeably barren.

The best mode, by far, is The One.Similarly, while NBA Live 18 has a variety of game modes to choose from, there are only a few that are interesting. The best, by far, is The One, a career mode with role-playing elements that puts its focus on your created player and offers a combination of “street” and “league” games. As you track your player’s progress from the end of their college career through the beginning of their professional career in the NBA, you’re met with several options on how to level up his skills, play style, and even the clothing they wear before games.

For instance, you can choose between dozens of unlockable skill traits, like extra endurance or a skill bump, in the moments at the end of a game. There’s also loot boxes that can only be purchased with in-game currency (real money option, thankfully) that give out a variety of accessories, including rare sneakers and whacky arm sleeves.Of course, as far as story modes in sports games go, the writing in The One can’t even live up to the most modest of expectations, much less EA’s own Madden NFL 18’s The Longshot campaign. Occasional mini-episodes of ESPN’s First Take provide a nice distraction and some fun storytelling, but even the chemistry between Stephen A.

Smith and Max Kellerman can’t make up for a lackluster plot. All the same, its role-playing elements are surprisingly nuanced, and if there is a game mode that’s worth sticking with, it’s The One. But elsewhere, the modes are largely too shallow to invest much time in. The Franchise mode, for example, is a staple of the genre that allows us to assume a general manager-type role – but here, it’s hardly more than an 82-game season with a few small bonuses along the way. Live 18 lacks the ability to customize players, scout prospects ahead of the NBA Draft, or engage in any kind of complex contract negotiation.NBA Live 18 is the first videogame to offer the ability to play as a WNBA team.To its credit, NBA Live 18 is the first videogame to offer the ability to play as a WNBA team.

You can play as any team on the WNBA roster, including the East and West All Star teams. While this mode is very similar mechanically to the NBA counterpart, I did find the court spacing to be a little better.

It’s a wonderful addition that is, unfortunately, not used to its full potential. Instead of being able to play a franchise with the likes of the Los Angeles Sparks or New York Liberty or even go head-to-head with someone else online, the only way you can play with WNBA is in “play now,” which limits you to local play only. It’s too bad, as the ability to play as a different set of the world’s best athletes offers a much-needed change of pace.Online play has a few different options (for the men), but again, most are pretty shallow. Instead of custom matches versus friends, you’re forced to play ranked games with predetermined settings. Veterans of EA Sports games will be pleased to hear that Ultimate Team is back and includes many of the same features as popular games like Madden NFL and FIFA, but at the same time brings nothing new to the table. If nothing else, Ultimate Team will provide a little replayability for a game that doesn’t have much of it. The VerdictNBA Live 18’s simplistic and fluid mechanics make for an approachable game of NBA, or WNBA, basketball.

But for all that it does well on the court, elsewhere it fails to live up to its potential. There are plenty of side modes, but few have the depth or interesting new ideas to be worth getting invested in.