Right off the bat, NBA Live 16 wants to get you in the game. Literally. Before you can do anything, you are asked to scan your face using the companion app from your smart phone. The scanning process is actually simple, quick and effective. Much easier than the time consuming face scanning from Kinect Sports Rivals. Admittedly, I ran into a little trouble when I made a second attempt at the scan. Wanted to see if I could change my expression a little. After a series of errors regarding light levels and my face size – ouch – it suddenly clicked and went as smooth as my initial attempt. The results are pretty striking. My new avatar bore more than a passing resemblance to me. He had my strong chin, my presidential brow and those bedroom eyes still generating baskets of fan mail to this day. In all seriousness, this is the most accurate facial scan integration I have seen in any game.
Once your big, fat face is squeezed into the game, you then get a chance to customize the remaining traits of your player. Everything from your play style to your physical traits. And you have to be considerate of factors such as height and weight because those options impact your stats. Understandably, the bigger and bulkier you are, the more you lose on your speed and agility. Sadly, I did not see any fantastically goofy options among the nicknames available to be used for your character by the announcers. Instead, I got what appeared to be a list of all the existing names of the players in the league. This seems pretty lame given most folks will likely enter their own names or colorful variants thereof. So why not have generic options like ‘The Big Bang’ or ‘The Flash.’ Even real world NBA nicknames like ‘The Dream’ or ‘The Black Mamba’ would have been great. This may seem to be a small sticking point. But NBA Live 16 accurately celebrates the individuality and bravado of the association everywhere else in this game. Failing to do so here seems like a missed opportunity.
Your fully customized avatar has a wealth of gameplay options awaiting. Most notably there are new online options in Summer Circuit and the return of Live Run from NBA Live 10. On the circuit, you play through tournaments hosted at famous courts. You and up to 9 other players can hit up games at Rucker Park, HoopDome and several sites sacred to hoop heads. Your performance in game yields new skill points and reward points you can use to further build your avatar’s game and wardrobe. Those who played Live 10 know that Live Run is a straight-forward pick up game of 21 with up to 9 other human opponents. When you cannot hit the park for a pick up game, these modes give you the next best alternative.
The standard gameplay options also return. Everything from the career mode in Rising Star to Ultimate Team. But where Ultimate Team is concerned, the option is a year behind the Ultimate Team modes in other EA titles. Both the new Madden and FIFA titles have the new Ultimate Draft. Live 16 does not. For a franchise looking to rebound from a recent series of misfires, failing to keep base modes consistent with the other sports releases from the same publisher seems lazy.
Speaking of lazy, your teammates on court are often all idle and no hustle. Especially when a custom play you have called requires them to move to another spot on the floor to receive a pass. The play calling part of this equation is fluid and seamless. You can either roll with the suggested play that appears in a prompt on the screen. Or you can hold the left bumper to call up a wheel menu and rotate through it with the right thumbstick. Once your play is selected, a visual guide appears on court with symbols indicating where to stop, where to move and where to pass. These cues are much better than the less explicit visual guides from Live 15. However, I noticed that my teammates were often several steps behind the play I called. Most notably when they had to hit their mark to accept a pass. This often becomes a crucial problem when you are late in the shot clock and need your man to hit his cue for a quick catch and shoot to beat the buzzer. Even more maddening is when they actually hustle to their mark but there is a delay from the moment you hit the pass button and the time the pass is thrown. Though infrequent, the input lag is a royal pain that fortunately appears more commonly with menu selections than on court action. You can imagine the horror of failing to see the pass you have summoned result in a blown play late in a game in which you trail by a narrow margin.
Input lag is not the only groan worthy experience I encountered in Live 16. While playing through Rising Star, I got a good laugh out of player animations following free throw attempts. The customary post-free-throw-high-five ceremony you see among teammates in NBA games is replicated here with one key difference. The hands never touch. In fact, there is typically a gulf of space between the hands of the guy initiating the high five and the intended recipient. Despite the clear lack of contact between the players, their hands and arms still move and react as though they made contact. Other oddities include a confusing change to the ability to simulate the portions of games in Rising Star when your player is on the bench. In Live 15, you would receive a prompt stating something to the effect of ‘Sim to Next Appearance’ whenever your player was on the bench. Live 16 makes this option less intuitive by promoting you to ‘Sim Game.’ The way the option now reads lead me to suspect my player was awarded zero minutes of play time in his first appearance as a Milwaukee Buck. Fortunately, I discovered that was not the case when I opted to ‘Sim Game.’ In doing so, I was shown the menu to skip to my next appearance. Later in the same game when I was back on the bench, I was not prompted to sim again. I was just shown a game taking place in front of me. So I hit the button I had used previously to sim and the menu to do so returned. And in this change to the management of your time in a Rising Star exhibition, NBA Live 16 has needlessly added confusion to one of the simplest, least confusing and certainly not broken aspects of last year’s title. Why anyone thought this was a necessary change is beyond me. It succeeds only in making the navigation of this mode less intuitive.
The presentation also suffers from its fair share of strange occurrences. For example, sometimes the sound just stops. Right there in the middle of the game. Total loss of audio is less frequent than the sudden silence of the crowd, though. This is usually temporary with all or some of the audio track reappearing. The rest of the presentation is standard fare. Overlays are sharp. Player models look like actual basketball players and move as such. I did experience only one glitch with the visuals. From the neck down, a player for the Wizards appeared to be made up of writhing polygons. Seriously. He was a moving stack of wildly wiggling shapes.
