Do you remember the glory days of 16-bit gaming? I certainly do and I often pine for simpler times when games were about the fun factor rather than epic movies where you get the chance to occasionally play as the main character, or at least one of the minor roles….anyway back to the point. When I was given this game to review I checked out the synopsis before I downloaded it. Fantastic (I thought) a game that brings retro to the present day, wow what wondrous things could happen?
I downloaded the game and smiled as it started up, after all nobody could mess up a retro style basketball game could they? Arrrgh, they could, they could and they did it in spades. Nothing about this game is right, it’s like a copy of NBA Jam with all the fun taken out of it. Nothing about this game works for me, and apparently the Xbox LIVE community aren’t too happy with it either, the game has been given a general rating of 2 stars. Personally I think that’s far too generous.
Let me explain a little. The game has no charm, it’s like a college project gone wrong. The promise of a retro experience is the only thing that this game delivers, but it is not a good thing in this case as the game can’t decide which decade it’s from. Is it 16-bit, 8-bit or perhaps even back to the days of the good old 48k games? The graphics are terrible, you can’t tell which player you are, I mean even back in the Megadrive days you had little distinguishing features that allowed you to play as your favourites, but this is full of faceless blobs. My apologies to the NBA stars who lent their likenesses to the designers in order for them to blatantly disregard both them and the people who play this rip off of a game. Yes I said rip off, because at 1200 MS points I would expect more bang for my buck. Back to the criticism…errr, I mean the review.
The camera angle is unchangeble and set at a really awkward angle, half the time you can’t see who you are, where you are or even if you have the ball. The sound is nonsensical, music ranges from some sort of 80′s funk to midi bleeps and bongs, there is no rhyme nor reason for this, it just randomly changes. Oh, and the squeeking, the incessant annoying squeeking of the players shoes, it varies into two types of squeek that even my pet rat couldn’t stand, she hid in the corner of her cage until I turned the sound off and I have never seen a rat with a relieved expression before.
On to the gameplay now. In this day and age you expect a standard of AI in your games so that you can at least expect a smallish challenge or a huge one depending on the difficulty you set your games to. This game disappoints even on that. Both your team and the opposition stand around waiting for the ball to come to them or run randomly trying to follow you. I mean it’s so bad that even on the hardest setting you only need to score once, then you can take possession of the ball and leave the room till the end of the match without worrying about anyone scoring against you. Oh and scoring. The game only allows you to score from set angles otherwise it’s counted annoyingly as traveling even if you performed the perfect shot. I can only surmise that the game was left to work experience kids to make (no offence meant kids). It has nothing about it that could even be called a saving grace.
I thought the Warriors: Street Brawl was bad until I played this game. I mean even the online play has been abandoned by the people who perhaps mistakenly thought as I did that this could be fine. In fact, when I played there were only around 12 people on the leaderboard who had anything resembling a highscore and knowing as I know now the horrible physics and AI capability contained within this game, it would only take a few games to beat even those, but I guess that people couldn’t even stomach playing for that long.
VideogameUK Verdict: 1/10
