Hopefully future updates make it even better, even if it’s just revisiting that one move that’s hard to fathom.
If it doesn’t bother you that you’ll need to assemble the basketball equivalent of a small army, NBA LIVE Mobile is good fun, and unquestionably the best free NBA game on mobile right now. It’s just silly in the way it doesn’t mirror real life at all, and while it doesn’t seem to be hurting its acceptance - NBA LIVE Mobile shot right to the top of the App Store charts and has a four-star rating at the time of this review - one can’t help but wonder if the game would have been more fun if the devs had just left things the way they were. It’s true that structuring team rosters this way makes for more collecting opportunities, and there’s no question that it turns an NBA game into a team-building exercise on par with Madden. Also, I pity the phone of the person who manages to acquire, say, a Stephen Curry card and learns he can only use the two-time reigning MVP 20 percent of the time. Instead of needing to collect around 15 players to have a team with no glaring deficiencies, you now need 25 of them. Now every player can only be slotted into one of your five lineups. It allowed you to surround your stars with role players suited for specific purposes, which is more or less how successful real life teams are built.įor some reason, EA decided to go even further for the wide launch. Collect Position and Team Tokens to earn players from your favorite NBA basketball team. Dunk on the competition by completing your daily objectives and win Live Events. Events available in the LIVE Today map.
with several spots where special players could be swapped in to provide bonuses. Download NBA LIVE Mobile and become a hoop master all day, every day. When the game was in soft launch, it used a system of different situational lineups - small ball, defensive, shooting, etc. If only the same could be said for constructing a team, which again, is the crux of the NBA LIVE Mobile experience. The swipe from the drive button to the shoot button to pull off a dunk when closing in on the rim is especially intuitive, and most gamers will feel that the controls stand up to the pace of play with no big problems. That arrangement seems like it could be a nightmare for a sport as dynamic and fluid as basketball, but the developers deserve kudos for making it feel comfortable.
The biggest and most pleasant surprise involves the controls, which utilize a virtual stick and buttons. That might seem strange, but a similar system worked just fine for Madden NFL Mobile, and it’s just fine here as well. Multiplayer is handled in asynchronous fashion, with each user playing alternating quarters while the AI controls the other team. The only problem is bumping up against the game’s unforgiving energy system, which essentially makes NBA LIVE Mobile good for only short play sessions. EA Games lost exclusivity with the NFL this year, and 2K Games have signed a deal with the league in the meantime to come compete for that slot.Multiple game modes that encompass everything from individual shooting drills to recreations of memorable moments from famous NBA games means there’s no lack of things to do. While EA Sports has tried to compete for 2K's hold on the NBA game market, the two companies have also feuded over supremacy in football.
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How will that affect NBA Live? Well as we have speculated upon earlier in this piece, there is a feeling amongst the community that NBA Live 20 was deliberately sacrificed in order to ensure a top-end first release on the Next-Gen consoles.Ĭould the PS5 and Xbox Series X see NBA Live finally get one over on 2K? Only time will tell. Well, that may be set to change with the release of the PS5 and new Xbox due to the impressive specifications that both boast ahead of their winter release. Whilst the majority of gamers worldwide will opt for Xbox or a PlayStation, there has always been the feeling from those PC gamers have it best. WHAT NEXT? Can Live have a resurgence on Next-Gen?