Basketball is not an easy sport to recreate in a video game. Just making the free-flowing action look natural is hard enough, but when you throw in the monkey wrench of human control it makes it much harder to animate a player that moves both realistically and exactly the way the person holding the controller wants. Motion-capture and good programming can only do so much, sometimes you have to make sacrifices.
Those sacrifices don’t have to be a bad thing though. Ending up with a game that moves well, closer to the real game’s pace and action than ever before doesn’t mean you ended up with a game that isn’t fun to play. NBA Live 10 is definitely fun to play, even if at times it feels like you’re really just a director of animation and the virtual players on the court are listening to your suggestions. If you’re a scrub like me, you might be ok with putting the game in the hands of the guys that know what they’re doing rather than my own.
I’m not saying you’re completely out of control, of course you’re not. But at times it feels a bit too easy to just charge the pile under the basic, hit the shoot button at the right time, and you can watch your baller have lanes open up for him after the fact, and then cruise straight into the basket like you’re a human highlight reel. Naturally, playing this way ended up causing me a lot of turnovers, so if you force the game to be unrealistic in your favor, it will turn around and be unrealistic against you.
The controls also expand in to more capabilities for people who want to mess with it. Quickstrike anklebreakers, pick and roll control, direct passing, all of these kinds of things are available to the player who wants to dig a bit deeper and give themselves some more options for taking the rock to the hole.
The core gameplay of NBA Live 10 is pretty easy to pick up, even if you haven’t played a basketball game since NBA Jam. Passing and shooting are single button functions, the right stick moves your dribbles around and executes different ground moves, and the turbo on the right trigger helps everything a little, including dunks. Defense is also fairly easy; stay close to your guy and the player will take care of staying on him. It’s no lock, and none of this means the game is a breeze by any means. But at least it won’t scare you off the first time you try it.
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