With annual releases, there’s an understanding that modern sports games aren’t going to be reinvented every year, but there’s an expectation that even incremental changes are marked improvements to justify a full new game. With NBA 2K24, the franchise hasn’t held up its end of the bargain. If you’ve played a 2K before, you know exactly what you’re in for, and it’s still a relatively faithful basketball sim with a good variety of gameplay modes and special events. However, in the context of the franchise, 2K24 makes few notable improvements, and the consolidation of its major modes contributes to a feeling of going through the motions, especially with the lack of a true story and the overwhelming presence of microtransactions.

2K24 uses the “24” in its title appropriately, highlighting the late Kobe Bryant and emphasizing a chase for the “Greatest of All Time” crown. Instead of a single player story mode, the campaign wraps in again with the always-online features in the 2K City. You create your player in MyCareer and immediately jump into the action as one of the most highly-touted prospects to make your debut in years, mirroring the upcoming real-life debut of Victor Wembanyama. Before starting anything, you build your dream 99 Overall player, which will generally define your play style in your early career. Your journey, then, is to become the GOAT. By playing through key games in the season and completing specific objectives, like outplaying a position rival or stopping a team losing streak, you gain GOAT points and work your way up a tier list of the greatest players ever with the ultimate goal of overtaking Jordan, LeBron, Kobe, and the rest.

"In the context of the franchise, 2K24 makes few notable improvements, and the consolidation of its major modes contributes to a feeling of going through the motions, especially with the lack of a true story and the overwhelming presence of microtransactions."

While it’s an interesting premise for a long-term view of your player, 2K24 doesn’t seem to be interested in making the quest to get there the real focus of the mode. Instead, MyCareer is effectively a stew of the career, online, and streetball modes the franchise has been developing for years, and while each of those modes are fun on their own, they don’t make a ton of sense together. As this highly touted prospect, you enter the league as a full-time starter, but while the comparable Victor Wembanyama is an 84 Overall, you begin as a 60. You’re encouraged to explore The City and play streetball, choose an affiliation, or complete other side quests to improve your character. Not only does it not make sense, however, that a supposedly generational prospect is playing competitive streetball games against men in khakis, but from this point forward, the game forces you to choose between glacial development or microtransactions. Like past years, you use VC to upgrade your character. While this isn’t new for the franchise, it may take multiple games for you to earn enough VC to upgrade one skill by one level, and games can take upwards of half an hour each. Or, of course, you can buy multiple levels worth of VC with real money, which speeds up the pace of development by an almost insulting amount and is clearly meant to be a major aspect of your experience with this game.

Even if you choose to avoid the microtransactions, the content in MyCareer is really underwhelming. There are a few voiced cutscenes sprinkled in, but I never felt any real connection to the character or reason to push forward. This isn’t a story as much as just a reason to throw you into The City to do what you want to do, and what you do hasn’t changed too much from past years. The overall MyCareer experience feels like a shoehorned inclusion of a story into an always-online open world, and the modes clash to both of their detriments.

The other key mode, MyTeam, follows a similar structure to past years. The solo and multiplayer modes are relatively short-burst games to help you build your team, and a mode like Clutch Time is still a relatively fun experience while you grind to earn VC or MyTeam Points. It’s still a bit jarring to see a longlist of objectives to unlock a single 80-something overall card, but its quick playtime makes it an easy way to jump in and make progress. MyTeam isn’t any more plagued by microtransactions than in past years, which isn’t saying much, but the new Player Market is a nominal step up from the Auction House. If you’ve played MyTeam before, you’ll be in for a very similar experience as in the past, for better or worse.

"The overall MyCareer experience feels like a shoehorned inclusion of a story into an always-online open world, and the modes clash to both of their detriments."

The only other notable gameplay mode is Mamba Moments, an opportunity to play through a collection of key games from Kobe Bryant’s career. Similar to the Jordan challenges from 2K23, you get to play moments like Game 7 of the 2010 Finals or his 55-point game against Michael Jordan. Like last year, this is a fun aside from the more substantial modes because you’re able to relive some of Kobe’s greatest games and control him in his prime. However, with only seven challenges, compared to last year’s fifteen, the mode feels a bit unfinished, especially considering it leaves out moments like Kobe’s 81-point game and his 60-point swan song to end his career.

On the court, too, 2K24 seems to have taken a step back. Shooting, for one, feels particularly inconsistent. Maybe it’s the fact that the new shooting meter takes a split second longer to appear, so you have less time to react, or maybe it’s the fact that the “excellent” timing is variable even during your shot and doesn’t tell you where it will be when you release. It all contributes to an expectation that any non-excellent release is a miss, even with some of the best shooters in the game. The AI, too, isn’t always predictable, especially when you have a player lock. Sometimes you’ll be waiting in the corner and a teammate will move right next to you, almost not noticing you’re there and penalizing you for poor spacing, or sometimes an opponent will seemingly intentionally commit a backcourt violation. I was surprised at how many times the AI had moments like this, especially considering that this hasn’t been a huge issue in my experiences with 2K in the past.

The other major talking point of 2K24 is ProPLAY, a new technology that recreates moments from real-life NBA games in 2K gameplay. It’s actually an impressive piece of the puzzle when you can recognize a star player’s signature move, and I’m excited to see how these inclusions will develop over time as the coming NBA season gets underway. However, it doesn’t make enough of an impact on the feel of the game to make a material difference, and I see it as more of an interesting addition than a real overhaul of animations.

"Aside from the expected graphical upgrade, the list of material improvements in NBA 2K24 is particularly short this year."

A few tweaks to MyTeam and the short-lived but fun Mamba Moments highlight the major sellers of 2K24 over 2K23, while a bevy of other issues, most notably the oppressive presence of microtransactions, remain or have gotten worse. The 2K series is absolutely still the most robust basketball sim on the market, and if you’re just looking for a roster update and some minor tweaks this year, then 2K24 is your game. However, with no real story to tell and no revolutionary mechanic to introduce, 2K24 is just going through the motions while it waits out a holding pattern that won’t seem to end.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.