The city’s scale is impressive: as well as the selection of courts there are also a bunch of small basketball hoops dotted around the streets that you can use for a spot of shooting practice and eventually find yourself playing H.O.R.S.E. Once this happens, you’re assigned one of four different factions and can then take part in a variety of games to try and earn clout for your faction (while naturally improving your own player’s stats along the way). You start off in a small area called Rookieville where you have to meet a few set goals in order to unlock the gates to the city. This is a surprisingly large environment you can explore using your created MyPlayer character. The most notable of these is The City, a new mode that replaces The Neighbourhood (and before that The Park) from previous games.
#NBA 2K21 XBOX SERIES S UPGRADE#
Fair play to it, then, for including some new modes to the Series X version of the game that genuinely make it feel like more than a simple visual upgrade and give players more to do. Making the game look better could have been enough for 2K: indeed, it’s been good enough for most publishers making that initial next-gen jump over the years, 2K included.
Shooting does feel a little less frustrating as a result of this. The gauge now stays the same size regardless of your player’s size (it used to get smaller and harder to see when your player was far away from the camera), and the gauge has now been redesigned to include an arrow (to make it easier to track) and a black line showing where the sweet spot is. While 2K has stuck to its guns and kept the shooting system intact, it has at least tweaked it to make it easier to get to grips with. The other slight tweak worth mentioning is to the shooting system, which was widely criticised among players who took an awful long time to get used to the shooting in the previous-gen NBA 2K21. As such, lovely as it looks, chances are you’ll want to change back to the previous-gen camera before long and stick to savouring the graphics during close-ups. This is undoubtedly an impressive looking viewpoint that not only highlights details but also gives a better sense of scale between player heights, but the reality is that it’s much harder to play the game with this viewpoint because it’s extremely difficult to judge depth at the back of the court. To make sure you see these new details better, the game’s default camera angle has dropped much lower and closer than before (similar to the way actual NBA games have been shot recently while its players remained in ‘the bubble’). While there are obvious examples of these like the gestures players make on the court, it’s the smaller details that really make the biggest difference when you notice them: the way eyeballs move more realistically when they’re following the ball during replays, the way fingers bend when catching and throwing the ball, the way their feet plant on the ground more realistically when they’re moving around. The animations have been given a revamp too, and do a brilliant job in giving players more personality. With its improved lighting too, playing it in 4K with HDR looks tremendous. Player models are obviously more detailed, but the entire arena just gives off a greater feeling of hustle and bustle, with far more going on and the court filling with more people – staff, performers, coaches, stadium security – during time outs and at the end of each quarter. Put the two side-by-side and you can instantly pick out the next-gen game with no trouble at all. There can be no denying that NBA 2K21 looks better on Xbox Series X than it did on the previous generation. It may not necessarily be the revolutionary reworking of the game some fans have been hoping for, but it at least adds one or two new features and modes not seen in the current-gen version released back in September.įirst, let’s focus on the obvious and most immediate selling point of next-gen NBA 2K: the visuals. NBA 2K21, thankfully, bucks this trend to an extent. Madden NFL 06, FIFA 06, we’re looking at you.
#NBA 2K21 XBOX SERIES S UPDATE#
The general rule of thumb, then, is that you buy the launch game for the visual splendour, but with the understanding that next year’s update will be the ‘real’ one with all the features put back in. It’s an unwritten rule of next-gen gaming that a console must launch alongside at least one sports game, and that everyone must fawn over how it’s the best that sport has ever looked in video game form, but then acknowledge that the race to get it on next-gen invariably means modes have had to be dropped in the process.
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