 Hello, this is Buona from Buona.tv and welcome to my full review of NBA Playgrounds. NBA Playgrounds is a modern take on classic arcade basketball games such as NBA Jam and NBA Street. If you've ever played any of these in the past, you will be familiar with this kind of game. I will be reviewing the PC Steam copy of the game and thanks to the developers at Saber Interactive for providing me with a review copy. First off, it doesn't take long to determine this game is best played with a game controller and not a keyboard. I didn't even bother with the keyboard and went straight to my Xbox 360 controller for PC. The controls are extremely tight and intuitive and I was able to catch on pretty quick. The other options for PC are somewhat lacking, however. You can change the resolution, the full screen options and windowed and a few audio settings, but the control customization is limited to keyboard. You can't change any of the controls for your controller or remap them. There's also a music slider, an FX slider and an option to turn off the commentator, thankfully. Now on to the gameplay. I'll get right to the negative stuff first. There's a stamina system in NBA Playgrounds. And this stamina system is based on energy that you can use to do stealing, to drive in for a dunk, to push someone away and other actions that affect the outcome of the game. I don't like it. For me, an arcade NBA game, I should say, much like NBA Jam of old, should have a stamina system. It slows the game down. It makes it so it takes it down a notch. And for me, when I think about NBA Jam and my prior experiences with it, it should just have running, dunking, passing, pushing, insane, obnoxious things that you normally couldn't do in a basketball game. And I think the stamina system takes away from that. It slows the game down to a pace that feels more like, I don't know, it takes it more towards the NBA street-ish, maybe even NBA 2K land with the stamina system. And I really, really just wanted to go to 11. I wanted to go all the way to the other side of the fence and just go obnoxious. No stamina. Just dunking, passing, crazy threes, pushing, just madness on the court. So overall, I just think the stamina system takes away from the game. It sucks the life out of the fast-paced nature of NBA Jam of old and ultimately NBA Playgrounds. The next thing that I don't think really helps the game that much is the RNG power-ups. And RNG meaning Random Number Generator. As you progress through the game, these power-ups will appear or become available to the player when your bar or your meter fills up. It does have a meter that you can fill up via dunks and other good things that you do like steels, maybe nail a three-pointer. Once that bar reaches full, it starts to spin an RNG wheel or random buff that can come up. And this can include things like unlimited stamina for a certain amount of time. You can get four points per dunk and there's also a bonus ball feature. And I think it's probably going to kill the game in some cases, like the game you're playing. Because just imagine you're in the final 30 seconds of the match. Your opponent gets this buff that he gets four points per dunk and you're down by one point and you're hoping to come back. He gets this buff and proceeds to dunk twice, giving themselves eight points. And you nail a couple of threes, getting six points and you can't even come back because he just got this thing on a roll. I don't like it. In a head-to-head game kind of like this fast-paced basketball game, I don't like anything that's random. And this just adds a random thing to the game which I don't like. These power-ups, you know, I think they're Arcadia in nature and they have a good spirit behind them, but I don't think they fit with NBA Playgrounds. I think a lot of people are going to be buying new controllers after this because it's going to create some rage-worthy moments where you're going to be very close in the game and one of these RNG elements are going to pop up and just totally carry the other player. Now, had that not been there, you probably would have won. And that's going to be the common ground for a lot of arguments. So the other two bonuses like the unlimited stamina aren't as game-changing, but they can affect it. But that four-point dunk is just ridiculous. And I would like the game more if this just completely went away. They removed that system altogether. I probably like the game even more. So yeah, the RNG power-ups, I think, are a negative. One thing that really bugs me is the announcers. The announcers were a thing that I remember from NBA Jam. If you talk to anybody that has played NBA Jam, there's a high chance they're going to go, he's heating up because that was one of the things the announcer said. And that was a very memorable moment from that game because you knew your player was about to be on fire and just he's heating up. And he was like obnoxious, like, Jordan down the middle with the slam dunk. Oh, there he goes. And it was obnoxious. It was over the top and it was perfect. It fit the game. These announcers, they don't hold a candle to the old guy. They're not even close. Basically, it comes down to a bunch of insults. They start to insult you when you're falling behind, talking about you may have spilled soda on your controller, you need glasses, blah, blah, blah. And it just makes you cringe and tune them out. I really wanted something over the top, like the NBA Jam announcer. But instead, we get a couple of dudes who just simply want to crack jokes on the sideline. It was a pretty big let down. Because, again, that's the one thing you remember from NBA Jam is that announcer, he's heating up. Instead, we get, oh, he spilled some soda on his controller. Oh, man. So there's an option to turn off the announcer. So that's thankfully there. And I think some of you will probably do that because they get on my nerves in a short amount of time. Another thing that is kind of annoying to me, and I think it may be PC-centric, because I don't think the console versions have this kind of a problem, is that the options don't save. One of the things, I was just talking about the announcer, I want to turn that thing off. You turn it off and it just doesn't save. I have the Steam version of the game. And I've tried running the game as administrator and tried some other tricks, but I just finally gave up. I can't change that feature. And I also cannot change the volume levels for the music and for the effects. I slide the sliders down with my controller. I click apply, hit X on my controller to apply. And I come back in, or I back out, and then all of a sudden the music is loud again and the announcers are still insulting me. The options are kind of useless. I mean, there's other options for resolution and window. Those work, but for some reason, these don't save. So I'm going to have to investigate. Maybe there's a config file somewhere that I can edit to see if it's read-only. Try to figure out what's going on with that. Another glitch on the PC that kind of bothers me is that when I alt-tab in and out, the game does unpredictable stuff. A couple of times it has frozen completely to where the music played. You could hear the sounds, but none of the inputs will work. Also, there were times where it would just come back to a black screen and you just couldn't get the game to come back up. So I don't know if that's related to drivers. There's a bunch of things on Windows that could be related to. That's another point of frustration with the game. That's something that can be addressed on the client side, on the user side. It could be something on my system. So it's not necessarily a ding towards the game. Just keep in mind that if you do get this game on Steam, you may encounter some similar issues. And lastly, I'm not a fan of the whole card pack system. If you're not familiar with what that is, whenever you level up in NBA Playgrounds, you get a card pack. It looks like a little pack of cards like you can buy at the convenience store or whatever. Grocery store or whatever. It's very common in a lot of sports games today. I can understand why this has been implemented in the game. And I can understand why they have this in here. Gamers love opening packs and or boxes in most multiplayer sports games these days. When I was coming up, that wasn't even a thing. It's kind of frustrating because I want some of my favorite players from the 80s and 90s. And I need to essentially grind to get the card packs to own them. I don't like this system, but I know some of you out there love it because some of the bigger franchises out there, Luton Madden, FIFA, and some of the EA sports games that are very popular today, have this sort of opening of boxes and packs. And I don't like the system. It doesn't make the game bad or terrible. It's a ding against the game from my perspective in my opinion. But I definitely don't judge anybody the wrong way if they prefer the system because, again, it's the norm. I don't understand it, but it's the norm today. And some people just come to expect it. But me, I still don't like it. I don't want this whole card pack system in my NBA Playgrounds game. Okay, I've gone on and on about the negatives. You probably think I hate the game, but that's actually not true. Let's talk about some of the positives of the game. I think the overall that the gameplay of NBA Playgrounds, it's a great throwback to NBA Jam and NBA Street. The reason why I say that is because I wanted to keep playing. I played it for a couple of hours and I got the gist of it. And if it didn't pull that nostalgia string, I probably would have put it down because I really haven't played that many sports games lately. I've been shying off of them. I've played a lot of Madden and NBA Live and NBA 2K in the past, but in the past few years, I just haven't been playing them that much. And I heard about this game and I was like, man, this is like NBA Jam. Love to be a easy thing up. I went down that whole thing. But this is good old-fashioned 2v2 Playground basketball with the notches, dunks and stupid crossovers and just crazy stuff. It's hard not to like it. And if it weren't for that stamina system that I mentioned earlier, I think it could be a lot more addictive to me. The nostalgia factor, I think, is what's pulling me in the most. Along the lines of NBA Jam, which I've mentioned before, but also seeing Magic Johnson, seeing Bill Lane beer, seeing Danny Ainge, Dominique Wilkins and Clyde Drexler, all my roster just makes me smile. It just brings back really, really good memories. Now, you could probably say, well, boy, you can play any basketball game. They have classics. They have legends. But combine that with NBA Jam, man, and you got something different. The sour passion is that I just need to buy car packs to get all the people I want. And despite my gripes with the car packs, I still want to play. I do believe that the nostalgia goggles are in full effect. And I think if it weren't for my childhood memories of NBA Jam, I probably wouldn't like this game as much. And you should probably take that into consideration when you're listening to this review. Is that, you know, if you didn't play NBA Jam, if you didn't play NBA Street, you might not feel as strongly as I do about this, get this style of gameplay. You may see a lot of other things wrong. But I think the game was made intentionally as a throwback to those games. It has the same style, same type of obnoxious, crazy stuff that's going on that, you know, for those of us who did play NBA Jam, we can easily relate to it. Now, I'm very happy also with the $20 price point. It has a basic single player campaign type deal where you go to tournaments and you unlock different playgrounds. It's not very, you know, not very robust, but it's enough to get to know the game and to have fun with it. And, you know, there's some repeatability to get those cards, to get those card packs and level up different people because there's different levels of level progression. There's your account level and then there's individual player levels. And as you level up each individual player, you get different moves and things like that. So that's all available to you in single player. And I think that's a good value for $20. On top of that, you do get online multiplayer and I did dabble a little bit in online multiplayer and overall it was good. It was decent. I was expecting a lackfest. I was expecting desync, you know, jagged, you know, just jagged movement and just a very unsmooth gameplay. Now, it took me a second to adjust because single player gameplay versus the online, you know, the online is a little bit, a little bit shakier. You can feel it at first and once you adjust to it, you don't notice it as much anymore. But the $20 price point with that online, that multiplayer online, coupled with the single player options, I think it's a good price point. The only change is that I wish that it came with a full roster instead of unlocking players with the car packs. That to me would be the ideal perfect scenario for this game is that you didn't have to, there weren't any type of grinding walls behind characters. If I'm paying $20, just kidding everybody. And you don't have that. So I've heard through the grapevine that this game will not have DLC. So what you see is what you get, essentially. And that's always a good thing in my mind. And I think for a game like this, that's designed to put on those nostalgic goggles and look in the past and compare it to NBA Jam, I think that's a really, really good thing. So overall, what do I think? Well, I'm going to say I recommend the game for you. You play basketball games at all. I'm going to recommend this game for you. I don't think people who aren't interested in basketball are going to try this game. Maybe because it is available for the Nintendo Switch and that console is kind of lacking on the game front. So maybe people who don't play basketball will try it out. But if you play any type of basketball game, whether it be 2K, whether it be NBA Live of old, even Double Dribble back in the day, I don't care what it is. I would recommend you give this game a try. I think you're going to get your $20 worth. If you don't get it from the single player, you'll probably get it from the multiplayer. Again, there's a lot of things that I think could be improved with it. The stamina system is just going to take some getting used to, man. And it's very frustrating, especially if you compare it to NBA Jam. The price point is decent. I think $20 is fine. Dealing with the car packs is probably going to be something that you're going to have to deal with. If you're getting this on the PC platform, be aware of the little glitches that I mentioned. You know, the alt tab glitches, the lack of ability to save your options, some of the things that I'm dealing with there. And also, just keep in mind that this game is designed for a controller. If you don't have a controller on your PC and you try to play this with your keyboard, you're going to have a bad time. I definitely recommend you play this with a controller. All right, guys, this is Buona from Buona.TV. I hope you enjoyed my review of NBA Playgrounds. This is a game for $20, available on Steam and on consoles, it's on the Switch as well. I'm mainly going to talk about the PC. I'll have links in the description so you can check it out. And I hope you enjoyed it. I want to thank the developers again for hooking me up with this copy. This is a review copy of the game. I did not buy this. This was provided to me for free to review for you all. So I hope you enjoyed it. Take care. Have a great day.