Basketball Classics

Honestly, a fun arcade style basketball game. Good amount of inspired rosters, simple but addictive gameplay. Works on the deck out of the box.

Rewelacyjna i bardzo grywalna gra o koszykówce w retro stylistyce. Zdecydowanie polecam jej zakup.

There's a lot to like here, but ultimately, I think it's about 67% of what I needed it to be. In principle, I love the idea of getting back to basics. The iterations they have made in the classic basketball simulation are welcome. I like the contextual dunk animation/minigame concept. Either I don't understand the tricks, or they get repetitive really quickly. Still a welcome addition. Play in general being repetitive is ultimately why I decided to return this. I got a little over an hour and a half into this, and it was already starting to wear on me. You are mostly helpless on defense (blocks and steals are possible, but they sometimes seem random; also, players will sometimes develop a black trail and slow down dramatically for some reason I don't quite understand making it impossible to defend anyone), and offense for me quickly devolved into trying to figure out how to get someone to the rim since the dunk is the most reliable shot. This is where the outcome of the primary dunk minigame reveals itself to be and feel somewhat random. If you happen to end height (low, medium, or high) that doesn't match the defenders, you make the dunk; otherwise, you are blocked. I understand these weaknesses mirror the era of basketball simulation this game is taking inspiration from, but I wish these had been additional areas of focus for modernization. I also would have liked to see the create-a-character career mode brought down from the modern basketball simulation into this. I think it could have been a great fit here. The biggest shortcomings were in user experience. The menus are ugly, which isn't the end of the world, but also I'm having to use them far too often. Almost every time I play, I need to go assign my controller as the first player controller. It seems to reset to keyboard on nearly every play. However, the controller still works in the menu, so I may not discover this until I start a game. To complicate things further, I can't get to options from the pause menu in-game, so I have to exit my in-progress game, return to the main menu, go into options, into controls, assign the controller, and then start the game over. It feels like none of this should happen, but it would be easier to handle if I could just fix it while the game is paused. On one occasion, I was dumped from an in-progress game back to the game's intro animations for no apparent reason. I'm concerned that the game is in this state given it was just released out of early access. If these issues haven't been fixed in what appears to be a fairly extensive early access period, I fear they won't be ever. In many ways, this game felt refreshing, but the playing of it fell just short of my expectations and the entire experience around the playing was very rough.