I've dabbled in a little bit of all the game modes, so here is my non-biased review from a guy who was with 2K for the better part of 8 years:
The One is a very fun game mode with a lot to do. The League games are funner than I expected and I actually enjoy playing them. Doesn't really feel like a grind. I appreciate how quick my player is able to be upgraded. I'm a casual gamer so I don't want to spend weeks getting my player to a reasonable level to play online (and I don't want to spend money to do so). If a game forces me to grind in a scathing way, I won't play it (I stopped playing 2K18 for like 2 months at one point, can't speak for 2K19 since I'm not buying that this year).
The Streets presents a pleasant challenge (Almost done with my playthrough). It's not too easy or too hard. Some challenges I literally had to play for an hour in order to beat, and I appreciate that! Others, I had no problem running through. I'm hoping that there are more challenges in the future.
Live Events are cool, just waiting on them to release more content. Haven't touched it since I completed them all during the demo.
Live Run is my bread and butter though. On one end, I've played a public match with Randoms (full 5v5) and it was a BLAST. The Live community, in my experience, has a considerably higher basketball knowledge than my experiences with the 2K community. I ran Live Run for a full evening and had a great time. The biggest issue (which I hope will be patched) is going from a private lobby with friends to a public lobby. I want to play with my friends against other people (we don't have a full 5 so it's like 3 or 4 of us). This could potentially be a problem for my other friends playing as I swayed a couple of them to buy Live. Needs to be fixed immediately.
Franchise is decent. However, trade logic is stupid. I was able to trade Marc Gasol and Mike Conley for LeBron James and Rajon Rondo. How!? LeBron should either be A) deemed untradeable by the Lakers and B) unwilling to go to Memphis since he has a no trade clause. That's unacceptable. Aside from that, Franchise desperately needs some depth if I'm going to play it. We need more in depth scouting. Not a Franchise expert, but I can definitely understand the outcry for that game mode.
Gameplay wise, Live just feels better. The dribble moves and movements are great, but I'm still kind of iffy about the fluidity of jumpshots. I just feel like the response time on jumpshots is slow (like it takes a kick start for the meter to show up). By and large, I LOVE how Live feels. There are moments where the game decides to make moves that I don't want to do, but aside from that, it feels good.
Layups. Need. To. Be. Fixed. Period. There are cases where four people contest some guy turboing to the basket and he makes some crazy *** reverse layup (the floaty ball doesn't make it any better). Conversely, I lost a Live Run game where I crossed a guy over (Broke his ankles) and then attacked the basket WIDE OPEN. My 6'10" guy decides to pull a Patrick Ewing and misses an easy layup where he could have either dunked it or kissed it off the glass. It pissed me off in the moment but I laugh about it now. Basically, I now fully expect heavily contested layups to go in and wide open layups to miss. Needs to be fixed.
I also feel like the contest system needs to be tuned too. I can literally hold my hands up and sometimes guys splash threes in my face. I get it, I know that it's possible to make contest jumpers, but from 35 feet away? That's asinine.
All in all though, I'm happy with my purchase and will be continuing to support Live.
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