NBA 2K17 is a worthy successor, but is it worth the upgrade?

We already went over some of the biggest changes you're bound to find the first time you boot up your shiny new copy of NBA 2K17, the newest edition of 2K Sports's flagship NBA franchise. But change isn't always good -- anyone who remembers the first version of Madden's Ignite tackling engine could tell you as much. Fortunately, NBA 2K17 has avoided this pitfall by making changes in a strategic way, changes that have far reaching implications that drastically improve the way the game feels and plays.

Let's Get Physical

I don't know if the developers had Olivia Newton-John songs on repeat while coding this game, but I wouldn't be surprised. Whether you jump in with career mode, an exhibition game, or franchise mode, you'll notice that the game is a lot heavier-seeming. Players are much harder to move past, screens are a lot more effective, and big men have more inertia, meaning that you have to be pretty precise on defense or risk over-committing to one side and careening off away from the play.

Happily, this inertia tweak is mitigated somewhat by the refinements that have been made to play in the post. NBA 2K16 featured a wide variety of moves players could unleash from a post-up position, and NBA 2K17 is no different. That said, the changes the developers have made to player interactions has made post play a lot more satisfying, and a lot less confusing. For the first time, backing down an opponent feels natural. Drop steps, outlet passes, and post moves designed to bait a defender into fouling you are a lot more effective. This applies to off-ball play as well -- boxing players out and wrestling for position is now necessary to snag a rebound, and defenders have tools at their disposal to force their man to go to their weak side, or muscle them out of the key. Everything feels a whole lot less random.

The flip side of this is that in making player interactions a lot more realistic, the developers also appear to have coated them in glue. Once you're engaged with an opposing player, it's pretty difficult to move away from them, even if you're trying to move in the opposite direction. This is especially frustrating when you're trying to move through the key to shift onto a defender off of a screen, run into your team's power forward, and try unsuccessfully to get around him and his man before getting called for a 3-in-the-key penalty, and no, that totally didn't happen to me in the middle of a big game thank you very much. It takes some getting used to, and the fact that player momentum has been tweaked only exacerbates that problem. At the end of the day, however, this isn't a huge issue, given that the upshot of this annoyance is that it finally, thankfully, makes it fun to play as a big man.

Ball Control

Much has been made of the fact that NBA 2K17 features new ball movement and passing mechanics, mostly by the 2K Sports marketing team. This is true, but at the end of the day, this isn't a hugely noticeable change if you're not forcing passes. It is admittedly easier for defenders to poke the ball away, however, and the ball now ricochets realistically off of players' hands and arms, which is a nice touch. It doesn't feel like the ball is snapping to players; it feels a lot more alive. Again, it's not a hugely noticeable change, but it makes the game feel a lot more true-to-life.

Career Mode and Presentation

The NBA 2K franchise has made a name for itself in past years with well-written and fleshed out career modes, and NBA 2K17 is no exception. Michael B. Jordan turns in a great performance as your player's rival-slash-teammate-slash-motivator-slash-friend, which is more than I can say for Coach K, who delivers his lines with all the excitement of somebody who just got invited to an acquaintance's improv performance. That said, this year's MyCareer mode is a lot more freeform, and allows for much more player choice between game days, which is a nice change from last year's more linear Spike Lee Joint.

Of course, there are thousands upon thousands of customization options for your player, your clothing, and your MyPark, but it's unfortunate that the character models for created players still look like characters from the Xbox 360 release of Skyrim. Most other characters look great, so if you don't really have any interest in modes that take advantage of MyPlayer functionality, this won't affect you, but for those that do, it's a shame that 2K Sports still can't seem to get character modeling right. They also tried to fix face scanning by bundling the functionality into a mobile app, but it's as finicky as ever, and never really seems to work as well as one would think.

As we noted earlier, the actual presentation of games has improved by leaps and bounds, featuring postgame interviews, pregame previews, rotating commentary teams, sideline interviews, player-coach interactions, and a whole lot more bells and whistles that make the NBA 2K17 experience a whole lot more authentic to the experience of actually watching an NBA game. Improved motion capture for players also adds to the illusion -- players feel and play like their real-world counterparts now, with the possible exception of James Harden, since you can actually control him on defense and do things other than stand around looking mildly enthused.

In Conclusion...

By now it should be obvious that NBA 2K17 is a quality game, and a worthy successor to NBA 2K16. But as with all sports games, that's often not enough. There's not a lot here that will justify a $60 purchase for an NBA fan who's just fine with NBA 2K16, thank-you-very-much, especially given the fact that NBA 2K16 was recently offered for free with a Playstation Plus membership. If you're an NBA fan and you haven't played a 2K game in a while, it's definitely worth a rent or purchase. Otherwise, unless you are, like me, a gigantic fan of big, lumbering post players, you're not gaining that much by upgrading.

Then again, you do get to text Coach K emoji strings in MyCareer mode, and if that doesn't justify a purchase, I'm not sure what does.