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.
