NBA 2K25 Review (PS5) | Push Square

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The life of a sports game reviewer can be a miserable one, but while much of Visual Concepts’ culturally colossal NBA 2K series is recycled year-on-year, it rarely settles for raw iteration. This is a developer that, for all its faults, genuinely appears committed to creating the best sports sim on the market – and it tends to lap its competitors through sheer budget alone.

NBA 2K25 subscribes to that sentiment, offering another enormous package that genuinely improves on previous games in meaningful areas – even if it feels like the franchise’s same old flaws will never be addressed. So, before we even dig deeper, we may as well come right out and say it: the microtransactions are as egregious as ever, and the live service grind will yet again consume your soul.

Still, this year’s game does appear to be a little more respectful of your time. While we enjoyed the idea of previous releases capturing every aspect of basketball culture, The City ultimately got bogged down with rapping minigames, catwalks, and pointless side-quests. This year proceedings have been streamlined, putting a strong emphasis on the thing that matters most: the basketball.

There is a campaign which depicts your player’s back-story: you’ll play college games and progress to the FIBA World Cup, before getting starting with an NBA team. But you can actually skip these flashbacks if you want to focus on your professional career and complete them at any time, so there’s a level of flexibility here which has been missing in previous games.

The City, the sandbox-style social hub where you can compete against others online, has also been reduced in size, removing the tedious emphasis on running about. A beach-style arcade houses all of the various shops and malls you’ve come to expect from the franchise, and it’s here you can use hard-earned in-game currency to purchase cosmetics like new sneakers and shirts. There are also a couple of minigames, like a go-kart track, which sprinkle in a little