NBA 2K15

TECHNICAL FOUL

NBA 2K15 steps onto the court as the reigning champion of basketball sims, but it’s a champion with an asterisk next to its name due to the extended server debacle of last year. Some of those online issues are repeated this year, which cripples some of NBA 2K15’s coolest features. But thanks to some good tweaks and the outstanding MyCareer mode, it’s still a game I can recommend as a strong offline basketball game.

This game is drop-dead gorgeous. Running at a smooth 60 frames per second, the seamless player animations really make it feel almost as authentic as the real thing. Just like in the real NBA, Tim Duncan will hug the ball before each game, Dwayne Wade will do pull ups on the rim, and Kobe will complain when he thinks he got fouled. 2K has paid great attention to detail, and it pays off.

2K15 reuses last year’s excellent TV broadcast-style presentation and heavy use of slow motion, and it looks just as stunning. That wasn’t broken, so it’s good that it wasn’t fixed.

However, there’s one sloppy oversight so glaring it’s hard not to laugh at: in the real world, Steve Kerr is now the Head Coach for the Golden State Warriors, and that’s reflected in-game. However, 2K15 re-uses his voice commentary from last year anyway. It’s a bit odd to hear him talking about the game one second and then seeing bizarro Steve Kerr roaming the sideline the next.

In the win column, a new pre-game segment featuring Ernie Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal does a surprisingly great job of distracting from the long load times with some entertaining contextualized commentary. Another addition is an in-game, live-action show called NBA 2KTV, which 2K says will be updated weekly to feature player interviews, behind-the-scenes videos, tips from the developer, and even Virtual Currency giveaways. This is front and center on the sleek looking and easy-to-use main menu, though it can get pretty annoying because it restarts every time you return there.

NBA 2K15 Wallpaper

On the court, NBA 2K’s core basketball gameplay is as strong as ever, with only slight adjustments from last year. Running the pick-and-roll or even the newly added triangle offense just feels so right, especially with the changes made to the defensive AI that make it more aggressive in stealing the ball from you. And including a shot meter was a brilliant idea - it gives me simple and immediate feedback, explaining exactly why I just missed an open jumper.

I’m sad to say that online franchise mode is an afterthought in NBA 2K15. It’s missing meaningful options, such as simple free agency. Conversely, the single-player franchise mode, MyGM, received a lot of love. There are almost no microtransactions (good riddance), the conversation system has been improved to give you more than just yes or no answers, and you can now earn XP even when you sim, which let me zip through a rewarding season as a manager without feeling cheated out of progress when I didn’t want to play full games.

The star of NBA 2K15 is MyCareer mode, which has been completely upgraded in nearly every way. The brand-new story has your player go undrafted, rather than being a top pick, and having to earn my way onto the roster was a fresh and welcomed change. The way you upgrade your MyPlayer is more streamlined, too, so there’s much less busywork involved. Rather than micromanaging each individual attribute, skill sets are now grouped together into categories, like Defense and Athleticism.

One of the most impressive things about the new MyCareer mode is that the veteran teammate that takes you under his wing finally found his voice. 2K Sports got a real NBA player from each team to actually speak for their game character, like Steph Curry for the Warriors and Demarcus Cousins for the Kings. They’re obviously not voice actors, but it still makes a huge difference to the overall experience.

2K15 also uses the PlayStation Camera or Xbox One Kinect to digitally map your face onto your MyPlayer, with hilariously ugly results. And, when I finally got a good scan, a server hiccup erased my face. It’s a fun thing to do at parties, but I wouldn’t want these monstrosities in my game.

But again, the 2K servers have completely destroyed several online modes. MyPark, the game mode where you take your MyPlayer onto the blacktop, is broken, despite splitting players between three separate communities. Crippling lag makes defense a guessing game, and that’s only if you can stay connected. When it does work, however, you can join and create crews with your friends, and even venture into the Jordan Rec Center to play full- length games with NBA rules.

MyTeam, the card collecting game, is also crippled. It’s too bad, because it’s full of additional content this year, with numerous single-player challenges that force you to think outside of the box. But the cumbersome UI just confused me, since the overall player ratings were nowhere to be found.

The Verdict

NBA 2K15 feels like a new-gen experience that 2K isn’t quite ready for. It’s an absolutely beautiful game to look at, and its controls are as tight as they’ve ever been. Some features are vastly improved from last year, and fortunately most of those continue to work when the servers don’t. It’s a shame that the best game modes won’t always be accessible, because this could’ve been an amazing basketball game. It still could be, if 2K can fix it. But if you buy it right now, you can expect a great offline experience.

Watch Dog : Bad Blood

As DLC typically goes, Watch Dogs: Bad Blood is a pretty substantial expansion. In what’s becoming an Ubisoft tradition (like in Assassin’s Creed IV: Freedom Cry), it takes a side character and takes him on his own lengthy adventure – in this case, Raymond “T-Bone” Kenney. But what’s interesting about it isn’t the story, as that’s fairly forgettable. The reason to play Bad Blood is the new Street Sweep missions, which bring out and highlight the freeform style of play that gives Watch Dogs its best moments.

Street Sweeps retool and reuse some of Watch Dogs’ existing open-world side missions as repeatable challenges that encourage stealth. They show me that someone at Ubisoft recognizes that Watch Dogs really works when it sends you into an open area with a goal, and leaves getting to it almost entirely up to you. These missions usually have secondary goals, like knocking out the target without being spotted, but they’re optional. There’s some freedom to get creative.

 

How quickly you get through the mission determines your rank on a leaderboard, giving bigger XP rewards for placing higher and unlocking a few unremarkable new weapons and skills. I’m

Watch Dogs: Bad Blood

The first major DLC add-on for Ubisoft's blockbuster action game, Watch Dogs: Bad Blood delivers a potent combination of action-adventure missions, seamless multiplayer modes and open world exploration.

As for the campaign missions, they’re just okay. His filthy-looking dreadlocks and sense of remorse make him a somewhat more distinctive character than the bland Aiden Pierce, but T-Bone isn’t a terribly likeable protagonist either. His banter with his neurotic sidekick, Tobias Frewer, got a bit annoying by the end of the five-hour story. And the ending of his conflict with another black-hat hacker (a returning character from the main campaign) does not make a ton of sense... but what can you expect from a game that revolves around magic hackers?

Watch Dog : Bad Blood Wallpaper

Level design in Bad Blood is a bit more puzzle-focused than standard Watch Dogs maps, with simple moving laser tripwire traps and occasional shifting walls taking the place of excessive use of hopping from camera to camera. Most of that was fairly unexciting - the stuff of uninspired platformers - but I do like how Watch Dogs’ flow-path hacking minigame is now often overlaid onto the world instead of against the blackness of a computer terminal. That cool touch made me feel more like I was hacking actual things.

The missions’ puzzle segments are broken up with unavoidable combat. Bad Blood brings in a few cool additions, like hackable security cameras wired to gun turrets, that make some of the wave-based combat sections feel unique to Watch Dogs. There’s also an RC car with an attached taser, but the ways it’s used in the campaign's puzzles aren’t terribly creative - it’s only good for going through vents that are specifically there to drive your RC car through. It's much more useful in the Street Sweep missions to knock out bad guys without being noticed.

Be advised that two of the three PCs I ran the latest version of Watch Dogs and Bad Blood on performed poorly, with significant hitching every few seconds especially while driving. It was nearly unplayable, even on a Core i7-990X with a GeForce GTX 780ti. However, the third PC – a Core i5-4670 and a GeForce GTX 780 performed well, easily hitting 60 frames per second on high settings. Since all three PCs have Nvidia GPUs and updated drivers, I’m at a loss as to what causes this problem, unless it has a distaste for high-end Core i7 CPUs. However, because Watch Dogs did run fine on one of those PCs, I can’t call it broken - I can only issue a warning that it may or may not have issues with your PC. If you're having trouble with Watch Dogs, Bad Blood probably won't be any better.

The Verdict

Don't get Watch Dogs: Bad Blood for T-Bone's mediocre adventure, get it for the much more interesting and free-form Street Sweeps. If only those were available separately, they'd be a no-brainer purchase for getting more out of what I loved about Watch Dogs, but with T-Bone and Tobias in tow, it's a little tougher to recommend as a full package.

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/10/10/watch-dogs-bad-blood-review