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NBA Ballers: Chosen One!

The ever recurring NBA Ballers series has...recurred again, but will it change anything from previous games in the series?

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B-Ball...With Glamour: The bulk of Ballers' content is found in the interesting, but shallow Story mode. Here you create a player, give him a unique nickname (we went with "Nacho"), and choose from hundreds of different shirts, jackets, pants, shoes, jewelry, and more to customize his appearance to your liking. You'll unlock more gear as you progress, but you can make a truly unique baller of your own with just the stuff that's unlocked from the start.

The structure of the career mode in Chosen One is pretty solid, with six episodes and a handful of chapters (chapters mean games to win) per episode. Each episode kicks off with an introduction from Chuck D. (yes, THAT Chuck D.) about the type of competition that you'll be up against. He speaks to you while sitting in a stylish NBA TV studio set and it's fairly effective, though a little contrived.

Let Me Choose, Let Me Choose: Attribute progression is handled a bit differently in this NBA Ballers than in most arcade style sports titles. Rather than letting you assign attribute points after becoming victorious in your competition, the game auto-assigns these points based on how you played the game. Now if only it actually worked.

There were several competitions when I would nail several three-pointers, jam home five dunks and get a +1 or 2 in both categories while others, like my character's speed, would nearly always get a +4. Every skill category gets a bump of +1 when you win a game, but it's clear that your progression is attempted to be slowed to ensure that dunk-happy players can't rule the air too early in their careers. If I want to dunk the ball eleven times to win a game then I should reap the benefits and deal with the consequences of that.

Combo Buffet: For Chosen One, a new combo system feature is an interesting in theory idea, but does not pull it off very well. The "combo system" consists of ballin' up to an opponent, and pressing the buttons that show up on the screen before he does. Sadly, he apparently has broken fingers because it is way to easy to pull off six-move combos with a single question of your opposing Baller.

Multi-Ballers: The online mode plays very much like the single-player campaign. You can bring you single-player customized Baller online, but other then that it's single-player. You can still pull off combo after combo after combo to win the game easily.

Rent vs. Buy: What I'm going to say is simple and short. Do not buy OR rent this game. Stay away completely. The single-player mode is way too easy, and way to boring and the online mode IS basically single-player.

In addition to those facts, the graphics are not the best on the console, not by a long shot and the models look clunky and undetailed. Stay away.

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