The on-court action is slick and fluid and reflects the pace of an actual NBA game. The NBA 2K franchise is known for its true-to-life gameplay and signature animations, and NBA 2K17 sticks as closely as possible to the same game plan that made its console and PC outing a success.Ī whole boatload of new animations - most of them are triggered by contact - have been added to make players react more realistically to just about every basketball situation you can think of. But as it stands, NBA 2K17 is a visually stunning mobile game, and it’s easily right up there with the eye-candy elite of the App Store and Play Store.
Here’s hoping a future update will someday sort out this issue and include new player models. Yet still, some guys like Jordan Clarkson of the Lakers have reddish faces that look as though they’ve been out in the sun way too long. But most other draftees, including potential Rookie of the Year candidate Kris Dunn, have been left out of the creative process, leaving them with generic faces.
Sure, Ben Simmons and Brandon Ingram, the top two picks of this year’s draft, resemble their real-life counterparts. Many marquee names like LeBron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and Paul George look especially good on our iPhone’s screen. Some guys even have detailed body scans, as opposed to pre-generated ones. The visuals are much improved over last year’s version, thanks in large part to better-looking textures and player models. We played NBA 2K17 mostly on an Apple iPhone 6s, and here’s what we think of the game. Even worse, a bug in the game prevents you from hearing her speech. For starters, there’s color commentary this time around, though Doris Burke still works the sidelines, whereas her next-gen doppelganger has already joined the broadcast booth alongside Kevin Harlan and Greg Anthony. NBA 2K17 for mobile, despite being only a year older, is a whole different ball game.
(UPDATE, OCTOBER 3: To see how different NBA 2K17 for Android is from the iOS version, read this article.)
A year after its release, it’s still nowhere as good as its console and PC counterpart (you can read our review here), nowhere as good as what it could and should be. N BA 2K16 for Android and iOS wasn’t a good port - it had no audio commentary at launch it ran slow as molasses on most devices, and many weren’t able to run it at all.