A fun and exciting way to spend a Staturday............for a short while.
My first impression of the game is that it was attracting the wrong crowd. A group of wannabe basketball stars who think that talking smack in a game gets them some sorta cool points or something. I still think that after having played for some time now. The people are pretty proud of themselves and their make-believe virtual "gansta" basketball players. So you will see a lot of slang in the chat, which I think just iluminates their ignorance ("yo dog, dat was tyte!"). This game was my first lesson in online “gangsta” typing etiquette. I admit, this could be considered a form of role-play, since role-play was lost many years ago some might see this as a refreshing return. But in reality, it is down right annoying.
The game-play itself is somewhat decent. You have a lot of skills and freestyle moves to choose from, and the game allows you to use up to 5 skills and 5 freestyle skills. There are also passive skills that you will train, such as rebounding, stealing, dribbling, and a bunch of others. There are first level skills, second level skills, and so on. Basically, once you achieve pro levels, you are usually training the second phase of your passive skills and selecting from a host of active skills and freestyle skills. By “active” I mean to say, those skills you would use by pressing key combinations on the keyboard, such as stealing, where your character swipes his or her hand forward in an attempt to steal the ball from an opponent. The many different skills can allow you to customize your character ever so slightly, but you usually end up the same as any other Guard, Forward, or Center out there until you reach level 15 where you can choose Shooting Forward, Point Forward, Shooting Guard, or Point Guard. A shooting guard, for example, would be one that would be prone to making more 3-point shots.
I have noticed that during a game, there is a lot of noticeable lag. I have made sure that the lag was not on my end before I wrote this review. I have been consistently achieving download speeds of 6 Mb/s through 9 Mb/s and upload speeds of around 1 Mb/s. So, this next segment is coming from someone who is on a pretty fast home network with pretty fast internet speeds. Lag causes many problems in a game like this. First of all, if you are not syncing correctly with the server, you will not see the ball where it really is. For example, in one game, I was passed the ball; I dribbled around to get an open shot because my other two teammates were able to get open. I shot the ball and suddenly the ball was slingshot around the court, ended up in another player’s hands and then went in for a score for the opposing team. That is extremely frustrating and the lag keeps getting worse and worse. Sierra's servers have to be on one of the worst networks around.
Another issue I have noticed in this game, is that player skill from game to game is not consistent. In one game you might shoot all your 3-point shots off-the-cuff with people coming at you and make every single one. In the next game you might shoot all wide-open 3-point shots with no one around and miss every single one. I don’t know if this is caused by server lag, or an imbalance in the game. Either way, it will ruin your stats and cause people to kick you out of their teams more often, because many people will review your stats before they trust you with a ball. If you are a Guard and your 3-point shots are less than 50%, then plan on getting kicked a lot by those stat reviewing team leaders. There is nothing wrong with reviewing stats, I am just giving you fair warning.
The pro levels are achieved by reaching level 16 with your character. From there on out there are two rooms aside from “pickup games” that you can choose from, “back court” and “Pro”. The back court room allows players from levels 4 and up play games against each other. This can be extremely unbalanced especially if there are only higher level characters in the room and along comes a level 4 guard. I am not sure why they set it up that way. The same thing can be said for the pro room, except in the pro room there are levels 16 and up. My first impression of the pro rooms left me with a desire to create another new character and stay in the rookie rooms. One thing that I did like is that when you reach pro, your character’s stats are wiped. That was a good thing because all of the “off games” that I had ruined my statistical standing in the world of FreeStyle Street Basketball. In pro, I think that any player will be hard-pressed to find a room while they are levels 16 – 25. I was kicked out of 30 teams in a row with my level 16 shooting-guard if that tells you anything. Low level pro players have an extremely rough time getting into a game, and when they do, it is usually incredibly unbalanced because they are faced against much higher level players where they usually end up walking out with poor stats.
All-in-all, the game is somewhat enjoyable in the rookie rooms. The pro rooms offer very little, if anything, new to the game besides some new skills and a new set of smack-talking kids. If you are absolutely curious about this game, you can play it for free and that is the only fee you should pay for the game because it is not worth buying in-game bucks or spending on anything else. There are so few players in this game these days that I wouldn’t be surprised to see this game canceled. Heck, EA canceled Earth and Beyond because they were only maintaining about 10,000 players, so why should Sierra be any different?