NBA Live 14 Reviews
[I]t's difficult to recommend now, and, given the wait between releases in the Live franchise, you're left knowing that NBA Live 14 should stay on the bench. Sorry kid – maybe next year.
NBA Live 2014 marks EA's return to the basketball sim, but there's little reason to play it when NBA 2K14 exists.
The problem is justifying an NBA Live 14 purchase when NBA 2K14 is on store shelves. As a newbie, I had fun with NBA 2k14, but I didn't have nearly as much fun with NBA Live 14. I felt like it assumed I knew more about basketball and basketball video games than I actually did. It just dropped me into the deep end and asked me to figure it all out, and all I could really do was button mash and hope for the best. It's a good foundation for a franchise that could prosper in the future--after all, I've been saying that sports games should use live updating stats via the Internet for years now--but at this very moment, it just pales in comparison to its competition.
That's about all we've got, though. NBA Live is a colossal disappointment in more ways then one; the technical aspects are well below average, the physics and animations are some of the worst we've seen this year, the AI is mentally deficient, and worst of all, nothing about this feels real. There are a few positives to which to cling, if you're a die-hard basketball fanatic.
Based on user and critic reception so far, I highly doubt that we will see NBA Live return next year unless EA Tiburon is truly committed to merely compete with their rivals at 2K Sports. If they can't, I think it's more profitable for them to revive one of their more critically acclaimed franchises like NBA Street and NBA Ballers.
If anything, NBA Live 14 helps prove that the NBA 2K series will be the reigning king of video game basketball simulations for years to come. Some decent game mechanics are ruined by very poor AI that has little to no idea of what to do most of the time. The audio is poorly put together, and the visuals are decent for the middle of the current generation, not at the beginning of a new one. The ESPN license feels largely wasted in the bare-bones presentation. A few modes are too tedious to be fun. There are some good ideas and modes here, but with so many issues plaguing it and few players online in the first few weeks, the whole effort seems pointless. With any luck, the plan for EA is to learn from this and deliver a worthy product next year. Unless you need every game on your chosen platform, just pick up NBA 2K14 for your hoops fix this year, and don't look back.