NBA Playgrounds

In a similar way, Playgrounds is pretty clearly trying to pay homage to old arcade classics like NBA Jam and NBA Street. What Playgrounds gets right about that is that it’s easy to pick up a controller and quickly feel at home. In no time I was drilling three-pointers and spinning into the lane for massive hammers. Its artistic style and tight controls are good at creating highlight reel-worthy moments, letting you meet someone at the summit to block a would-be ridiculous dunk or hit a late, long shot to seal the game.

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Its pace of play is slower than something like NBA Jam, but it works for Playgrounds. It’s not so much about darting up and down the court to get power-ups, but rather about timing a crossover to coincide with when your opponent reaches for a steal or throwing a timely elbow to clear some space before going up for a three-point shot. This pace and timing is something I only started to truly get a feel for after multiple hours of play time, adding some level of depth.

“ Some things felt unfair or difficult to read.

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The timing-based shooting mechanic is another element that does not quite fit this style of game. The intent is to add an element of skill that separates experienced players from the inexperienced by rewarding a perfect release with an extra point, but the animations just aren’t consistent or readable enough. There’s no way to really know if shot timing is tied to each shot or alley-oop animation, or if it’s the same across all of them, so even after playing for many hours I am no closer to deciphering the perfect timing that the AI can execute reliably.

This lack of explanation also caused confusion when it came to the shoving mechanic. It’s never explained that shoving will deplete the meter you’re trying to build up, and so it took me a bit before I figured out why I was never filling my meter enough to get a power-up. Once I knew how these two things relate to each other, I never used shoves unless I already had an empty meter because the payoff wasn’t worth the downside. Instead, it just seemed more logical to mostly use the steal button, which is strong enough on its own.

“ Importantly, there are no microtransactions.

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Speaking of post-release content, one other update that will be a welcomed addition is four-player online play. Currently, it’s limited to two players online, with each controlling a team with an AI partner, and as of now the teammate AI is functional but not ideal. For example, sometimes when I tell my teammate to go up for an alley-oop he’s very delayed or never does it at all, which leads me to idly dribbling around or trying to score a different way before I lose the ball. Those little miscues can be the difference between a win and loss, and so the high-level competitive aspect of this game online will rely on four players being able to control all the action.

The players you use will also level up as you play more games with them, giving them new animations in the process. Unfortunately, Playgrounds does not make it clear what types of animations are being unlocked, so I didn’t really care much about getting my players from the “bronze” to “gold” level. This is a missed opportunity to me because there are a ton of awesome dunks and a healthy variety of dribbling animations, but without telling me what I’m getting, I don’t know what to look for game to game.

Tournament mode, exhibition, and online play are the three modes available, and winning each of the six tournaments the first time rewards you with a new court, a “golden” pack of cards (which gives you a better chance of finding Epic and Legend players like Allen Iverson, Magic Johnson, and Shawn Kemp) and a new power-up. Tournament mode took me roughly four hours to complete, but it only took that long due to a couple of frustrating difficulty spikes. Going up against a dynamic duo like Shaquille O’Neal and Allen Iverson required some trial and error to find the right combo, which felt jarring because Playgrounds didn’t usually ramp up the difficulty match to match.Playgrounds is not a game I would want to keep playing for long if I were only going to play against the CPU, and so couch play and online is where I’ve spent more of my time. However, it’s not very well built out at the moment – at launch you’re limited to matchmaking only, so there is no way to play with friends online. (The Switch version has no online play at all right now, but Saber says it will be added in a post-release patch.) This, in conjunction with the lack of four-player online play, really hurts the online component for now. But I’ve still had more fun online than off.