Draft Day Sports: College Basketball 2020

As a sim that focuses on recruiting and team-building, this game scratched an itch that I've had since losing the EA and 2K franchises on consoles. DDS CB202 does a particularly nice job of simulating the recruiting experience, it doesn't provide much excitement when it comes to playing the game of basketball on the court. That being said, in the very small market of college sports sims, it's a pretty good game for those interested in exploring what it would be like to try to build a career as a college basketball coach. HIGHLY CUSTOMIZE-ABLE, IT TAKES A LITTLE BIT OF WORK TO MAKE IT "REAL" While the base game consists of "fictional schools" that are based on the real schools (ex. "North Carolina Rams"), you have to download and install a user-created file from the Wolverine message boards if you want the real school names--which worked for me and made the game even more enjoyable. THIS IS A CAREER SIMULATOR, NOT AN ACTION GAME The weakest part of the game in my opinion is playing the individual games. While there are many options as a coach to keep you busy including switching offenses/defenses, increasing/decreasing defensive pressure and offensive pace, calling timeouts, and controlling substitutions, I don't really enjoy participating in the games and prefer to simply simulate them. The on-court action takes place with jerseys sliding around the court, a ball moving between "players", and a pretty basic text-based play-by-play ticker. Compared to games like Out of the Park Baseball, the on-court experience is lacking. BUILDING A CAREER WILL TAKE TIME I created a coach and started out as a head coach of a small school. Unlike other games, I can see that building a legendary career is going to take some time. Even after getting my small school to the NCAA tournament 2 years in a row, the only other job offers I had were head coaching positions at smaller schools or assistant coaching positions at larger schools. I'm only 4 years in at this point, so I can't yet comment on how well the game holds together as years go by (I did see that UNC was under .500 two years in a row which would be very unusual for that program; and teams like Florida emerged as perennial national championship contenders), but I do feel like I have some control over the sim through my recruiting and coaching decisions. OVERALL, IT'S A GOOD GAME FOR WHAT IT IS Overall, as a head coach simulator, I'm really enjoying the game and look forward to sinking many more hours into this one.

Really fun simulator game, The hiring/firing mode is really great but the recruiting is a tab bit difficult. any advice on better recruiting results.

The game is good and in depth but it is a bit glitchy and i will sometimes get error codes and i would have to fix the problem myself, also it would not let me spend money on the scouting report things

This Game seems to have a lot of freezes and stop[s working. Real problems when changing from one season to another. The processing time between activities takes much more time then other games. The game is fun when it works.

The 2D game UI has frozen three times today just by trying to click on a button while mouse is slightly moved (i.e. can be interpreted as dragging action). The window is dragged under cursor and the game becomes unresponsive. I really like this game but as of now it is rather unplayable. Shame. Edit: I managed (once) to regain control by clicking randomly around the speed slider for few minutes. Can't say it added to the experience.

Got this game at launch and overall I have enjoyed it a lot (until recently playing again), but loading time is ridiculous and no major updates resolved this issue. Also, as time went on more problems rose making this game more of a chore to play. Was looking to purchase the next game for this and the college football one, but am very hesitant with the lack of fixes. Big potential though.

a lot of bugs... cant complete a season without it just breaking and gets to a point where you cant even load the save file

When my pc went down, this was oddly the game I missed most! I don't even watch basketball......till now!

Played 2018, 2019, and 2020. This is the worst of those 3. I question if the designer is forced to release a game every 12 months whether or not it is ready. No doubt, no one on the design/development team played the game. If they did, they probably threw up their hands and said "eff it, it can't be fixed! On to 2021." And then someone in the Art Department was quietly thinking in the corner "But this was my best work - sad face."

I like it a lot. I liked 2018 a lot. I was worried they'd try to change too much, but that's not the case. Instead they improved and streamlined a lot of the tedious tasks in 2018. The interface is so much better. It feels like they actually have a real UX designer now. Recruiting has some slightly new logic. If you spend a lot of time on 2018, you should upgrade.