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NBA Ballers: Chosen One Review (X360)

From Eric Qualls,
Your Guide to XBox Games.
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Midway is back with another entry in the NBA Ballers franchise, but the results aren’t so good this time. The presentation is fine and it has a definite smooth style to it, but the core basketball gameplay just isn’t all that fun. When the basketball aspect of your basketball videogame is the weak link, you have issues. There is some fun to be had with NBA Ballers: Chosen One if you learn to put up with the complicated controls and other quirks, but you aren’t missing much if you skip it.
Quick Hits

  • Title: NBA Ballers: Chosen One
  • Platform: Xbox 360
  • Publisher: Midway
  • Developer: Midway
  • ESRB Rating: “E” For Everyone
  • Genre: Arcade Basketball
  • Pros: Decent player models and animation
  • Cons: Complicated controls; tedious and unfun career mode; slow gameplay; canned super moves

Features

NBA Ballers: Chosen One has all of the features you’d expect from an arcade basketball game, plus a few extras. You can play 1v1, 2v2, and even 1v1v1. Most of the best players in the NBA are included in the game along with several NBA legends. Online play is also present and accounted for, of course, and is fairly playable but suffers from slight lag that makes some things somewhat tough to do.

The main single-player mode is story mode. Story mode has you creating a character and then challenging NBA stars to street ball games. As you play, your character improves his stats and earns new gear. Pretty standard. It is split into six chapters with different challenges in each chapter, and these challenges give you specific rules and requirements you have to meet in order to win such as performing certain special moves or overcoming points deficits. This gives the game a lot of variety, but some of the challenges are very, very difficult and frustrating, to the point where many people likely won’t even finish it. That is a bad thing.

Gameplay

Midway
Why won’t they finish it? Because the gameplay isn’t good enough to punish yourself long enough to put up with the frustration. The biggest problem comes from the fact that the controls are very complicated for what should be a simple arcade-style game. You have a ton of moves at your disposal, but most of them require multiple button presses and modifier buttons and it takes a while to learn everything. On top of that, the controls are somewhat unresponsive so even when you think you have everything down the game doesn’t always do what you want it to. Something else I really dislike are the canned animations for super moves (sort of like NBA Street’s GameBreakers) that take the controls out of your hands and make you sit back and watch. Sure, they can be cool to see the first time, but when the game design dictates that you should be using them extensively, it gets repetitive and annoying very quickly. The game also has kind of a slow pace like the players are moving through molasses. The core basketball just isn’t all that fun to play here.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, NBA Ballers: Chosen One looks pretty good. The player models are nice looking and the animation is very smooth. The menus and cutscenes are also well put together and look very stylish and cool and very appropriate for the game.

The sound is also pretty good. Surprisingly, it doesn’t hammer you with hip-hop music like a lot of basketball games, which is nice. Public Enemy’s Chuck D does the play-by-play and also hosts an in-game TV show, and does a pretty good job overall.

Bottom Line

Midway
All in all, NBA Ballers: Chosen One is merely an okay game. It doesn’t do anything terrible and game breaking, but it does more to drive you away than to draw you in, which is a bad thing. It looks and sounds good and offers up plenty of modes, but the gameplay just isn’t all that fun. Complex and unresponsive controls, sluggish pace, and unskippable special move cutscenes kind of suck the fun out of the game. Give it a rental if you are a fan of the series or are just desperate for a new basketball game, but I can’t recommend NBA Ballers: Chosen One for a purchase.
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