NBA 2K once again sits in the top tier of sports games for the reasons that matter most, but a pay-to-win scheme continues to infect some of its best aspects.
Like its past several installments, NBA 2K25 is the best sports game I’ve played this year, but it still comes with a bolded, can’t-miss asterisk. This year’s basketball sim from Visual Concepts represents the latest in a series that has been lapping the competition in the sports genre–a group of games each seeking to be your live-service obsession. None justify their time commitment as well as NBA 2K25, which is in a league of its own–for presentation, gameplay, and overall immersion first and foremost–but the whole is actually less than the sum of its parts due to long-embedded pay-to-win tactics I fear will never be undone.
This year’s biggest changes involve a new dribbling physics system that gives ball-control a more realistic feel. The impact of this is hard to explain but easy to recognize when you’re playing it, aided by enhancements to the game’s ProPlay animation system that converts real-life game footage to in-game mechanics. Virtually everyone has, at one point in their lives, played basketball, even if it’s just shooting baskets at the park or a friend’s house. You know what it feels like to maintain ball control and dribble, keeping it away from other players and feeling the weight of the ball as you learn to control it without needing to observe yourself doing so. NBA 2K25 captures that authentically, adding additional support to an already-excellent gameplay foundation that goes back years.
Unlike some other series that dispose of ideas if they don’t work after a few years, NBA 2K has always seemed more committed to iteration, tweaking unwelcome features until they become enjoyable ones, and turning good aspects into great ones. Year two of the ProPlay system expresses this attribute. 2K24’s foundational overhaul is made more nuanced with numerous new animations, many of them built to mimic a player’s real-life play style. Basketball is a sport composed of many individuals who approach the sport in different ways, such that no two hoopers play exactly alike. NBA 2K25 better replicates that player specificity with more unique jumpshots, signature moves, and even post-score celebrations that are pulled from real life.
Last year, the community was up in arms about the game’s “green-or-miss” shooting mechanics. This meant players would need to time their shots perfectly (landing in the green zone in their shot meter) or else they’d miss the attempt. This year, the Visual Concepts team has addressed that feedback by offering two divergent shooting options. One of them uses the same green-or-miss mechanics of last year, which has a high-risk, high-reward outcome and relies on your own controller skills to overcome a strongly contested or off-balance shot. The latter is more forgiving of a less-than-perfect attempt, but is more beholden to things like positioning and defense. To borrow from Madden’s terms, this is the “sim” option to the former’s “competitive” option.
Effectively, this gives all players their choice of a retuned version of last year’s system or what was in the game before 2K24. In either case, it’s all made more manageable thanks to the game’s incredible UI customization options and create-a-jumpshot suite. Combined, these features allow you to not only alter the look of your on-screen shot meter, tweaking its size, shape, colors, and placement, but also build your own jumper so you can find something with a timing pattern that works best for you.
On-court play runs very deep, and for new players it can be daunting. NBA 2K finally offers something it’s lacked: a deep skills trainer that tutorializes the whole game. Learn 2K mode is designed for basketball novices, intermediate players, and even pro-level competitors needing a practice facility between games. It teaches basic fundamentals of the sport to more complex features with a wildly high skill ceiling, such as ball skills and fakeout moves–ankle breakers, essentially.
This new suite is only a good thing, as sports games tend to become impenetrable over time because they can assume most players are returning from past years, but each game is some number of players’ first foray, so it’s great to have this robust new game mode onboarding players who need it.
For many years now, no other sports game has captured the atmosphere of an authentic TV broadcast of its real-life sport quite like 2K. That continues in 2K25, and though there are perhaps no major bells and whistles debuting in the presentation side of things this year, it’s also hard to fathom how it could improve much. It feels like the series has hit its ceiling in this respect, but it’s a ceiling to be proud of, and no other sports game is nearly reaching its own.
Commentary is once again lifelike to a degree that keeps it at the very best in video games. It uses multiple commentary teams featuring loveable personalities like Kevin Harlan and also keeps all of its talent sounding realistic, delivering depth and a cadence that would fool you into thinking it’s a real NBA game if you were only listening to it. Commentators recall past matchups accurately and discuss NBA history and rival showdowns yet to come, before inviting players to interact in post-game press conferences and answer questions from the media.
Timeouts oscillate from sideline playcalling huddles between coaches and players to the wide-ranging on-court entertainment, like mascots performing tricks or dance crews putting on stylish shows during would-be lulls. The atmosphere, score bug, crowd and commentator reactions–it’s all incredible. It’s been this impressive for a while now, but it never gets old.
Halftime shows remain hilarious and actually worth watching, and the hosts jump around the league to discuss other scores and highlights with a welcome blend of mirth and analysis. In between games in the career mode, an in-universe TV show–the likes of which is reliably cringeworthy in games like MLB The Show and Madden–is instead entertaining in NBA 2K25. I don’t skip them. They’re fully animated, voiced, and actually compelling, like one episode in which the hosts debate how to rank the league’s dynasties throughout its history.
No other sports game is going to these lengths, and though other series’ try to do some of these things, they are often not compelling enough to experience more than once or twice. In NBA 2K25, I don’t touch the skip button. When I started a new season as the Celtics, I watched their championship-ring ceremony on opening night and marveled at how great the cutscene came together. NBA 2K25 looks, sounds, and feels like real life, and it makes me a bigger basketball fan because of these features.
Another now-annual expression of how this series laps the competition is its franchise-style mode, MyNBA. Two years ago, Visual Concepts introduced Eras, a trailblazing feature that lets you start a league in one of several different decades dating back 40+ years. Each era includes attire, rulebooks, playstyles, presentation, and rosters that authentically capture those various points in time. This was impressive out of the gate, and like last year, a new Era has been added in 2K25: the Steph Curry Era.
Like the Kobe Era did when it debuted last year, this adds a new gamified starting point in NBA history and seeks to tell the story of the period with things like more complicated player contracts and the new in-season tournament for the NBA Cup. While the bulk of this mode’s exciting feature set was introduced two years ago, a new Era is a fine way to build it out further, though this particular Era has the least appeal of any so far as it’s effectively present-day and less of an intriguing time capsule like the others.
NBA 2K has been expanding on its WNBA modes in recent years, and this year’s suite is yet again its most robust yet–though it’s still catching up to offering feature parity with the men’s league. The WNBA is more popular than ever right now, owed partly to high-profile rookies like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, and the game mode reflects that with the same excellent presentation elements that sell the appropriate gravity of this new era of women’s basketball. In The W, akin to the men’s MyCareer mode, you can now participate in press conferences as your created athlete for the first time in the series, and you’ll focus largely on chasing historical greatness with in-game elements that challenge you to outperform the aforementioned star rookies before eventually reaching the WNBA’s GOAT status.
I enjoy this aspect for different reasons than the MyCareer version. In that case, it’s more of an exploration of basketball history I largely already know. With the WNBA, it’s a lot newer to me, so it’s been fun to play the mode more like a history lesson. Commentators recall legends of decades past or more recent runs like Becky Hammon’s back-to-back titles with Las Vegas. In press conferences, the media’s questions help me infer additional context for a league that was in the background for so long, but as it’s now coming into a brighter spotlight, 2K’s offerings feel like they’re built to match that next level of interest.
You sadly can’t take your WNBA player into the game’s social space, which I detail below, but it feels like the 2K team is making a genuine effort to expand on this suite of modes, and it amounts to about as much content as some other major sports games on the market. As it does in many other ways, the game’s WNBA suite suggests many more resources or much greater use of its resources to create a game with this much cool stuff to play.
The game’s main attraction comes in two different but closely linked features: MyPlayer and The City. MyPlayer is the avatar players create, choosing from one of several RPG-like builds or customizing their stats pip by pip across many categories like dunking, three-point shooting, vertical jumping, and lots more. You can put your own face on the character by using a mobile companion app, and that technology has become better over time to where I now use it every year and like how it turns out–this wasn’t always the case.
With your MyPlayer, you can play their backstory, which takes you through high school, a FIBA World Cup game, and more before joining an NBA team in MyCareer, which is the single-player mode that focuses on your avatar’s achievements. 2K25 builds on last year’s GOAT list, in which players tried to pass Jordan and others to be recognized as the NBA’s best player ever, to now build a dynasty that can surpass the likes of the Showtime Lakers, LeBron’s Heat, and Curry’s Warriors.
In other sports games, this solo story mode often feels like a barebones preamble to some other longer-term mode you’re meant to move onto swiftly. But in 2K25, this isn’t the case. Though there is a separate element the game wants to funnel you into, it’s also built out a lot to make playing multiple seasons in the NBA very enjoyable in its own right. Chasing NBA history is tough, and the game makes your championships and accolades feel well-recognized, with a social feed, media reactions, and live-action messages from other athletes sliding into your DMs to congratulate you. The mode successfully captures the magnitude of moments, owing to the aforementioned best-in-class presentation.
Before, during, or after your NBA career, you can also take your player into The City, a sports-MMO social space with live-service elements like daily and weekly challenges, a huge variety of game modes, and plenty of shopping opportunities. The City is where I’ll spend most of my time post-review sessions every September, because it’s the central hub of the game’s massive community and the activities in it are usually enjoyable. However, its daily and weekly challenge system asks too much of my time and prevents me from ever considering buying the battle pass since I know I’d have to give up some other games in my free time to hit all of NBA’s live-service goals. In other live-service games in which I’ve invested my time, completing my dailies tends to take 15-45 minutes by design. NBA 2K25’s orders are more time-consuming, to an extent that I sooner write off trying to keep up at all.
Games of different sizes and with varying, sometimes arcade-y rules, can be found all over in different parts of the city. You can take on challenging CPU boss battles against NBA legends, jump into 3v3 pick-up games with random players, train at the gym to improve your player’s stats and gameplay-altering badges, or enter into ultra-sweaty Pro-Am games with a dedicated squad of teammates seeking to be recognized at the game’s best players.
As a play space, The City rules. Every other sports game looks worse in comparison each subsequent year they fail to offer something similar. A vibrant social scene is the lifeblood of a live-service game, and NBA 2K remains the only annual sports game offering such an awesome virtual hangout space to its players.
In years past, I’ve enjoyed The City but lamented its pop-up ad aesthetic; it looked like a shopping mall from hell, with billboards and branded content in every direction you could look. This year’s game cleverly fixes this problem, if only incidentally, by reimagining The City as a beach boardwalk setting. I find malls fundamentally unappealing, but a beach boardwalk is much more palatable as a place where I’d expect to find several stores, so I no longer mind a few ever-present blocks of shoe, clothing, tattoo, and backpack stores. Simply by the game presenting it differently, I don’t feel bombarded with ads to spend my virtual currency, even though just as many options remain there.
Having said all that praise, The City being the game’s prime attraction also reveals its one major flaw: a pay-to-win economy. Because the same currency used to buy cosmetics for your custom player can also be used to make that custom athlete much better on the court–from a player rated 60 overall all the way up to 99 for those willing to buy that much virtual currency–the game’s coolest unique feature is also hamstrung for reasons that aren’t mysterious and yet remain mystifying in their brazenness. Over many years, NBA 2K has nurtured a community that eagerly opts into spending a lot of extra money on day one so they can stay afloat in the social scene, and each year this approach returns, it harms the otherwise fantastic game’s overall appeal.
Because I’ve been writing about the way NBA 2K wages war against itself for a few years now in my reviews, I’ve actually stepped out of the review to write a companion piece this year, in which I go to greater lengths to discuss the game’s microtransaction–more accurately a macrotransaction–problem. This is an issue that’s been seen in this game’s annual installments for many years now, and in NBA 2K25, things have not noticeably improved–though you can now more easily matchmake with more casual players and build squads of others with in-game avatars similar to yours in rating.
These address some symptoms of the game’s economic woes, but they don’t fix enough despite an obvious cure being available: prevent players from buying stat upgrades. That route surely loses the publisher an unfathomable amount of money, so I worry we’ll never see it come to fruition. You can read my extensive thoughts on that at the link above, but it’s safe to say that this serves as a blemish on NBA 2K25’s otherwise excellent gameplay experience.
NBA 2K is a peculiar game to critique for this perennial reason; like a social media label for a messy relationship, it’s complicated. Suffice it to say the thoughts I’ve expressed in that companion piece weigh on my conclusion here, and you should consider this a two-part review, in a sense. 2K25’s greatest flaw is obvious: Its economic designs make the game worse, and it’s impossible for anyone without a Randian “greed is good” worldview to justify it.
At the same time, everything else it does is so impressive, both as a basketball sim and when stacked next to any other sports game, that it’s a delicate balance to find with words. It does so much so well, and much of it is done uniquely. But its refusal to decouple its marquee features from its virtual currency keeps this championship contender from reaching its full potential.
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