Game Overview
ESPN aren’t just a US sports channel, they are now branding some of the best American sports games to date. ESPN NBA 2K5 joins ESPN NFL 2K5 and ESPN NHL 2K5, will it raise the bar in sports games, will it get anywhere near the already amazing EA range NBA Live.

We have never been big fans of any basketball games; we all feel that they are a case of up one end, shoot score, back to the other end, shoot and score, over and over again. If you think about it though, you could say that about any sport. But boy, were we proved wrong!

OK, ESPN NBA follows the same kind of lines as ESPN NFL 2K5 (see the ESPN NFL review), great graphics, smooth gameplay, great interaction, sounds spot on and does everything you could want a NBA game to do. However tedious it does get.

Again, with American sports, there are a lot of rules and if you are not into basketball or have never played it before you might find yourself struggling with the rules and how to play it, but keep plugging away and if you’re unsure there is always the internet, which holds all the rules somewhere! A quick flick through of the instruction manual usually solves the problem so you can continue the drubbing of some of the best basketball teams in the world.

One huge thing that really started to annoy us after a while was the free throw controls, we eventually worked out what in the world we were doing with them but, damn, how hard do they want to make it! We can think of a hundred different ways they could have used to control the free throws but they didn't ask us! It really spoils the game at first because you always seem to be fouling and free throws are almost impossible to convert, which obviously leads to a low scoring and very boring game!

Our Conclusions
Great graphics, good gameplay but like we thought, it does get a little tedious. What else is there to say, it’s a basketball game that we think just pips NBA Live at the post, you are quite welcome to prove us wrong!

Overall Score: 7/10

Thanks to BlokesOnly's King of Games Chris Swanson and Adrian Lawton from Take Two, without them this review would not be possible.