NBA 2K18 is a hardcore sports simulation. If you want to get good, you have to put in the work. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to improve your skills no matter how you want to play. And the fact that there's so much to do is a bonus, because on the court, NBA 2K18 is also an amazingly well-crafted experience.
The first thing that strikes you is how it looks and feels like a real-life professional basketball game. The 2K series' attention to detail has always been incredible, and this year is the best yet. Using the default camera, it's almost hard to discern between the game and an actual NBA broadcast. Great, varied commentary and the three-way chemistry of Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O'Neal during halftime make it feel like a Thursday night ballgame on TNT.
NBA 2K18 is also on Nintendo's less powerful Switch, but don't discount that version: it still looks great for what it is, even if it falls short of its bigger brothers. Of course, there's the added bonus of playing in portable mode, which also helps diminish graphical flaws given the Switch's small screen.
NBA 2K18's controls remain largely the same since the introduction of the Pro Stick setup in 2K14. Movement is handled with the left stick, and the right stick controls things like shooting, where you finish your lay-ups, and ball handling. Alternatively, buttons can also be used to pass and shoot, so if you don't like shooting with the stick, you don't have to. But the stick controls are satisfying, especially when you cross over your defender and drive to the hoop for a layup. You feel like the ball is completely in your control.
Succeeding in NBA 2K18 has always taken a certain level of basketball IQ. You need to not only be able to spot open teammates but also know when to pass and what type of pass is best for the situation. It's also about setting screens, running hard defense, and understanding your players' strengths. Thankfully there is a great way to learn everything you need to know through 2KU. This tutorial and training mode lets you learn everything from bounce passes to screen plays. It's very robust, with freestyle and scrimmage options, and is super helpful in perfecting your game without having to rack up losses in one of the other modes.
There are numerous ways to play, with each game mode having several choices to ball. Play Now has choices to play one-off games against the AI, online, in the streetball Blacktop mode, or against friends. MyCareer lets you compete against other players in what was known in previous NBA 2K games as MyPark, a game of pick-up streetball now found in the MyCareer Neighborhood. They serve as fun ways to hone your skills, take some pressure off, and advance your experience and VC earnings.
MyTeam is a card-trading fantasy league where you build a team by unlocking cards with players, boosts, playbooks, and uniforms. It's still the same solid NBA 2K18 basketball on the court, with the added twist of deck building. It's also place to spend real-world money, if you so desire.
This year's big hook is the expanded MyCareer, the story-driven create-a-player mode with the new Neighborhood central hub. You pick your position, favorite team, and then tweak the look of your player before the story begins. MyCareer starts off with a streetball tournament, where you try to prove your worth to team scouts. It has the same teammate ranking system as in past years, where your grade with your team goes up or down depending on your performance.
Outside of the court, MyCareer has a fairly typical rags-to-riches story, with you guiding your player from unknown rookie to much-hyped superstar. When you aren't playing, you're in the Neighborhood, a new addition that lets you wander around a few city blocks, playing games, practicing, buying clothes and shoes, and more. It almost feels like an MMO when you first drop in. You're surrounded by other 2K18 players and their avatars, wandering around the neighborhood and working on achieving the ultimate 99 overall rating, known as OVR.
There are two general ways you can climb your player to the highest NBA 2K18 heights: you can train, play, and practice, or you can just spend a bunch of virtual currency and skirt the whole thing. A 99 OVR puts your player on-par with LeBron James, Magic Johnson, and perhaps the greatest to ever play the game, Michael Jordan. But getting there requires an enormous amount of work--unless you're willing to pay, of course.
There's a gym--excuse me, a "Gatorade Power Center"--in the Neighborhood that lets you build level and experience towards badges and increasing your next OVR level. The mini-games in the gym are exceptionally un-fun. They mostly involve alternating button presses or stick movements. Just starting a mini-game takes longer than actually playing it, as your character shakes their arms and gets into place in an excruciating, unskippable animation each and every time you do any of the workouts. If only there were a better way to build up your OVR and boost levels.
Oh right, microtransactions. You build up VC by playing games in MyCareer, which is standard 2K fare. But the amount of VC and experience you earn feels miniscule, even during sessions where you play at the top of your game. In past years, VC flowed more freely, so buying VC with real money feels almost like a necessary evil now. The game is too stingy on its own, which makes earning enough to advance your character a long and lonesome hill to climb.
Past iterations rewarded skilled players with difficulty multipliers. NBA 2K18 does away with all that. You can increase your earnings by having a great game, making baskets, sticking to your defensive assignment, and generally playing well. But there's no reward for playing at the higher difficulties.
It's also hard to build up your earnings early on in the MyCareer season because, as an unproven rookie, you don't get a lot of minutes on the court. That lack of playing time severely limits your earning opportunities. There are other chances to earn VC, like answering trivia questions in loading screens, but the most you might earn is 500 VC if you manage to get every question correct. It's not just stats that cry out for VC. Shoes, shirts, tattoos, even haircuts require you to spend virtual currency. It's impossible to ignore how much easier it is to break out your credit card than to play your way to the top. It's the difference between walking miles to work, or hiring an Uber.
Basketball is a way of life, and each year, NBA 2K is a big part of that cultural movement. Real NBA players worry about their NBA 2K ratings. This year's entry is incredible in so many ways, from graphics, to soundtrack, to the different modes and ways to play hoops. It becomes clear early on that the fastest and easiest way to progress is by spending real money, slightly marring an otherwise tremendous experience.
Stepping back into the world of Warhammer is always a fantastical journey, and with Total War: Warhammer 2, never before has an adaptation of the source material felt quite so natural.
With the second installment in its massive strategy game trilogy, developer Creative Assembly has begun flexing its design muscles. Battles are bigger and more expressively animated, and scores of soldiers of all different types--be they ghastly undead or blood-thirsty dinosaurs--sound impeccable, but the improvements run well beyond the aesthetic and into the fineries of tactical and strategic play.
Where the first entry in the series kept to standard Total War form with an open-ended, Risk-inspired campaign of territory control, now there's a directed focus--a vortex which is said to seal away legions of Chaos Demons.
Within the context of the Warhammer universe, Chaos is an all-consuming malevolent force that corrupts and distorts. Long ago, a ritual helped quarantine the forces of Chaos behind a seal so that normal life could thrive. Now, though, you, and a number of other forces across the map will be racing to take control of that seal--to whatever end.
Your target takes the form of a swirling Vortex comprised of magical energies. As you progress through a pre-made set of special quests, you'll be able to start performing rituals that will, in time, allow you to wrench control of the Vortex from everyone else. But, since all the other races of the world are pushing towards the same end, your progress will be marked along a track with five milestones. Each time you (or anyone else) performs one of the five successive rituals, the pace of the entire campaign picks up.
This mode still balances Total War's signature dualistic design. As you're worrying about the stability of the Vortex, you'll also need to manage cities and tax your people, as usual. You'll research new tactics, weapons, and monsters, and conduct diplomatic consorts with the various races of Warhammer. And, should talks break down and two or more armies meet, you'll be ushered into a tactical view that will task you with micromanaging your troops.
Rituals often take quite some time to complete, and, in the interim, three of your most powerful cities will be marked. Opposing factions will try to sack, capture, or raze any of them. And, if you don't control all three by the end of the ritual timer, you'll have to try again; and still deal with the invaders you directed to your lands.
Completing rituals marks major steps in the game, in part, because you'll need to ensure the safety of your home front while you presumably press battle lines across the map. It complicates play with an interesting, macroscopic challenge that every player will be able to approach a little differently.
The global quest tracker/countdown has been seen before in Masters of Magic-descended strategy games, but here it's backed with specific quests that play to the lore of each race within the Warhammer universe. Lord Mazdamundi, for example, is struggling to revive the great Slann mage-priests who once guided the feral Lizardmen on the fields of battle. And your quests will revive and recruit the long-slumbering Slann to use in your own armies. That's quite distinct from the approach the Dark Elves or the rat-like Skaven will take to victory, for example. The former specializes in naval combat and tailor-made invasion vessels known as Black Arks, while the chittering clan rats of the Skaven are better suited to hit-and-run attacks. Their whole civilization being subterranean means they need not worry so much about foes razing their ritual sites.
As you progress through the campaign, your foes become more numerous and the evil forces of Chaos will filter onto the map in an attempt to stop you. During the late-game, after 50 hours or more of play, they will be monstrously powerful. These are tests, in a sense, as they'll gauge how well you've distributed your forces and managed the challenges posed to you thus far. And they encourage you to seek help from your neighbors, as it's difficult to pull together the might all on your own. That brings up one of Warhammer 2's most engaging consequences of the Vortex rituals.
Progression yields huge impacts for diplomacy, encouraging you to forge alliances with those of your own faction. This make sense, in play, because each group's broad goals are distinct within the lore. Lizardmen, for example, believe themselves to be the only ones following the will of the old gods and they are among the closest this universe gets to an unambiguous "good." Dark Elves, by contrast, are fueled by torture and slavery and causing pain to others. Should they wrench control of the Vortex, they will, of course, use it for their own violent ends. This confluence of goals can lead to the creation of confederations, which are a fancy name for one of the most useful ways to build your empire. Like minds can, over time, be persuaded to let themselves be absorbed. This merges politics, economies, and research trees, and gives you a quick, sudden expansion of territory, often with a new legion of eager soldiers for your command.
This keeps the game from chugging in the middle and latter stages, where you'd have to take back razed cities from marauders only to carry the dead weight of a developing province for a while before seeing any return. The new system both fits thematically and boosts the importance of diplomatic and factional ties on the map. Generally you'll get along with your own groups better, but you'll also find yourself stepping into long-standing political alliances, many of which aren't always the easiest to navigate. The focus, of course, is still on the battles, but this breaks up long stretches of action with some careful maneuvering from time to time.
As you pick up more subjects and commission larger and larger armies, you'll no doubt unearth some of the other major new additions to play. Choke point maps, for instance, give you a lot more to consider in your approach to special in-game locations. Some will funnel your forces through a bridge, giving you a very narrow front on which to concentrate, others will use different types of land to give bouts more depth.
Through a thousand tiny tweaks, they've refined the experience into one of the most intriguing and exciting strategy games ever.
The effect on play with that alone is huge, as it means many powerful strategies aren't always applicable. At the same time, you may find that a holdout army formed of all cavalry can repel a far stronger force in the right conditions. In time, you'll learn where these battlefields lie on the map. That, in turn, opens up countless other broad-scale strategies designed to guide foes to the points where you've got the strongest defenses. You could always do this to a degree, of course, but the results are far starker here, on top of adding much-needed variety to play. Combined with the pacing changes that the race to control the Vortex brings, Total War: Warhammer II feels fresh, even though you'll be stepping into the same universe as last time.
Eye of the Vortex, as the single-player mode is called, is among the best a campaign of this type could be. It encourages the right amount of conflict to keep you moving, paces itself well, fits plenty of in-universe lore for diehard fans, and fine tunes about every other facet of its predecessor. Plus, as the game wears on, you can rest assured there's a definite, clean ending. Someone's going to complete the rituals--even if you don't. At the same time, the multi-part and complex victory conditions can often lead to some of the most nail-biting matches around, made that much better by diverse maps that encourage novel tactics with each bout. Nothing feels quite as exhilarating as holding a key province against multiple unsuccessful assaults thanks to your own cunning.
Every piece in Total War: Warhammer II is designed to force you to innovate and create new plans on the fly, testing your prowess over and over in new and exciting ways. In fact, Warhammer II surpasses its predecessor in nearly every respect. Everything except the camera--which doesn't zoom out far enough and has been a source of frustration for several Total War games now--and multiplayer..
The complaint with its online multiplayer is simple: there aren't enough factions for competitive play. At present, you can only use the four groups featured in the Eye of the Vortex campaign--Dark Elves, High Elves, Lizardmen, and Skaven. Given that the first game started with five for multiplayer and rapidly expanded from there, it feels like a step backwards to have so few options for now. Not being able to pit vampires against dinosaurs is a shame. And it'd be cool to see how Elven dragons fair against the mighty Dwarves, but that'll have to wait. There are some planned free content expansions coming, including a massive campaign map that spans the lands and races covered in both games, but that's some time off. Those fans who were put off by the monetization of content in the first will likely have the same complaints, though they can rest assured that the base game is robust on its own.
With Warhammer II, Total War doesn't reinvent anything so much as it iterates on the ideas that made the first so special. At its heart there's still the marriage of Total War's big-scale strategy and Warhammer's precise tactical play. But, through a thousand tiny tweaks, they've refined the experience into one of the most intriguing and exciting strategy games ever.
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