Review: NBA 2K25 (Xbox)

We didn’t get a chance to review 2K’s NBA offering in 2024, but after playing the game in our own free time, we found ourselves hanging up our Air Jordans in pretty short order, as the whole thing just felt way too familiar to 2023’s effort – which we’d already pumped hundreds of hours (and an embarrassing number of real world pounds) into.

Yeah, we know, these are the well-known issues with yearly incremental refreshes of this nature, especially ones that are designed to steal all of your money, but more than we can recall with any other annual sports series, we felt thoroughly burnt out on Visual Concepts’ b-ball antics last year.

And so it’s a bit of a surprise, returning for NBA 2K25, to find ourselves absolutely glued to the whole thing all over again. Addicted, all over again. The reason for this? Well, it’s mostly on the court – as it ought to be – where passing and defending have been notably tightened up. This feels like the slickest basketball game from this dev yet, which is saying a lot, and meaningful improvements to these fundamental aspects, alongside more animations and enhancements to the game’s already stellar graphics, mean that you’re definitely in for a good time if you like shooting balls into baskets.

But there’s more to it than just refinements to controls. NBA 2K25 has better menus, it’s easier to parse the various modes on offer, the flow of loading into games is smoother. This might not be of huge import, but it helps in making this feel like the most refined 2K offering so far. Small things like how Triple Threat matches don’t just sort of cut off when they finish, instead seguing back to the menus and other modes with a bit of style and grace. We appreciate these things.

The overall shape and speed of games at default settings is ever-so-slightly more arcade in nature, too. Passes are more accurate, turnovers happen more often thanks to the improved defending, and rushes to the opponent’s net feel faster and looser. It’s just a really great game of basketball on the court, quite simply, and if you know the series, you’ll know there are a myriad of options to tweak and sliders to mess with to get things how you like them in terms of difficulty and depth.

Speaking of depth, this is an absolutely enormous game, and as usual for this series, it can be fairly overwhelming for newcomers. Thankfully, through the MyCareer, MyTeam and MyPlayer modes, as well as time spent zooming around in the new and improved City, there are a ton of tutorials, challenges, videos, tips and tricks for players to pore over in order to raise their game to a competitive level. You really have all the tools at your disposal here to go from complete basketball greenhorn to a good player who – more importantly! – has a decent real-world knowledge of the game.

The story mode has been stripped out and replaced with a more match-focused, RPG-styled affair here, too. It works well to give you a slight narrative thread through flashbacks and special matches, whilst ensuring the focus is on getting you into games first and foremost. Through career and the city aspect of proceedings, solo players can expect to have a hell of a lot to do, and that’s before we even mention the returning MyNBA and its superlative Eras mode. This time around we’ve got The Steph Era, focusing on the legendary Golden State Warriors team of 2016-2017. Eras was our favourite mode in 2K23, and this time around it’s even better, thanks to slick presentation and a deep and interesting narrative journey. These games have been teaching us a lot about important aspects of basketball’s history over the past handful of years, and that continues here, which is fantastic.

We also get The W in 2K25, another returning mode that allows you to take part in the Women’s NBA league, and of course, there’s a ton of online gameplay options to dig into for those brave enough to face off against other actual humans. We could NEVER!

So, with the best gameplay of any 2K basketball effort to date, alongside a ton of modes, refined menus, improved loading times, hundreds of new animations…you know, the whole thing, the actual playing side of this franchise is very impressive this time out. We have no doubt that plenty of bugs and issues will shake themselves into view as the meta develops over the first few months of online play, but for now this is super good basketball action that looks and sounds as “next-gen” as you’re gonna get in this current gen…which…we still seem to be calling the next-gen, for some reason.

Finally, and on a more sour note, it’s impossible not to mention the microtransactions at play this year. We hate microtransactions at the best of times – and yes, we spend too much money on them, we’re not above it all – but this year is worse than ever. From the moment you boot up – even when you’ve splashed out for the ultimate edition – you’re still having upgrades to passes and all-sorts of sh**e rammed down your throat. It is what it is, and it’s the way of things these days, but it still drops the score somewhat for us thanks to how in-your-face it is for 2025.

Get over this one rather large issue, and you’ve still easily got the best basketball sim we’ve played thus far, though. NBA 2K25 is an enormous and all-consuming thing. From building your own player, team and franchise, to battling online, building new player shoes from scratch, messing with badges and collecting sets of classic stars…there’s what feels like a galaxy of basketball goodness here, a tribute to the greats of yore, as well as the current crop of ultra-talented stars. It’s a shame they gotta mar all of that lovely positivity and passion with greedy, grubby practices.

Conclusion
NBA 2K25 is the best the series has ever been on the court. This is slick and addictive stuff with improved passing and defending, hundreds more animations and a ton of big modes to sink your teeth into. Eras is a standout again, it’s great to see the women’s game included, and fans of digging deep into stats and shoes, badges and builds will be more than happy. We’d love to slap a higher score on here, we really would, but there’s gotta be a penalty for such egregious and constant microtransaction badgering when players have already coughed up a bunch of cash for the game.