Basketball

Genre: Sports (Basketball)

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Sabec

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Review:

The plainly-titled game Basketball by developer Sabec, released on Nintendo Switch in 2018, is… let’s just say it’s a simple and straightforward representation of the sport. And thus ends the things I can say about this game that aren’t completely negative.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. The graphics look like they came out of the original PlayStation era, and not in a “fun, stylized” way, but a “someone threw this together really quick” way. There’s no music, and what little sounds there are are pretty terrible crowd and ball bouncing noises that immediately sound repetitious.

At the very least, you might hope that there’s some fun to be had in the gameplay here, but no. Just no. The game shifts your control from one player on your team to another without warning or any clear indication why. It seems to have nothing to do with your movement or button presses, nothing to do with how close a player is to the ball… the game just randomly decides sometimes that you’ll swap players.

As infuriating as that is, the game is still an absolute cakewalk. Partly this is because the computer-controlled players move much slower than you even if you have the ball, and as a result you can dance circles around them, get up real close to the hoop and score a basket with very little effort. After doing this multiple times, I found myself reaching for the multiplayer in hopes that there was some saving grace to this disaster, some reason to keep playing it… only to find that this game has no multiplayer.

For this absolute shameful mess of a basketball game, Sabec wants to charge you $10. I… I don’t even know what else to say about that, any complaint or criticism I have pales in comparison next to that price sitting on top of this garbage heap of a game. I wouldn’t buy this game if it was one dollar.

Even when I hate a game, I try not to let my disdain for the game flavor my review, but I see little reason to bother when it comes to Basketball. This game is technically playable, but there is zero reason to play it. The game is so easy you could sleepwalk through it, zero fun to play, has no multiplayer, looks terrible, has controls seemingly designed to enrage the player, and it’s a game that’s priced at $10. If after everything I’ve said, you’re still foolish enough to buy this game, you deserve what you get.

tl;dr – Basketball is bad in just about every way a game can be bad. Terrible graphics, horrible sound, bad controls, stupid AI that’s pathetically easy to beat, no multiplayer, and an insulting price tag. I strain to think of anything about this game that’s not terrible. Without a doubt one of the worst things I’ve seen on the eShop.

Grade: F

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