Here's the latest in a long line of basketball games, and this one's hoops with attitude.
NBA Ballers: Chosen One
Midway
Xbox 360
4 stars (out of 5)
Review by Hayden Meikle
There has been a glut of basketball games on consoles during the past year but nothing quite like this.
NBA 08 was all polished realism on the PlayStation 3, NBA Live 08 and NBA 2K8 presented the usual mix of up-tempo entertainment, and NBA Street Homecourt jammed and rammed home the appeal of street ball.
Now NBA Ballers joins the market.
Chosen One is the third in a series - the last one was called Phenom - but the first I've seen in New Zealand.
It's hoops with attitude, all the attractions of basketball without the need to set the proper screens, switch defences or pay out your disgruntled superstar's multi-million dollar contract.
Chosen One is built around a story that has you, a created basketball player, some NBA stars and a group of playground ballers coming together for a tournament to find . . . the next chosen one.
The usual sort of stuff follows: talking some trash, throwing down some killer dunks, levelling up your player, and slowly moving up the ranks.
The gameplay isn't perfect but it's solid enough.
Midway, the developer of NBA Ballers, has a strong background in fighting games and it shows.
The usual basketball controls are augmented by regular button-mashing combos to pull off insane moves.
Most of the action is one-on-one and two-on-two, with a little bit of rule variation tossed in to the single-player mode.
It probably sounds like a cross between Homecourt and NBA Jam and that would be a reasonably accurate summation.
Chosen One could have been a bit longer - the main story mode only takes three or four hours - but it's a nice addition to any basketball video game library.
