EA Sports has brought some nice sports titles to the Iphone this year in Tiger Woods, Madden and FIFA.  Now they bring their game onto the hardwood with the fully licensed and well-presented NBA Live 10 where the mobile gamer can pick-up-and-play a single  game, season or playoff with any of the 30 NBA teams and their up-to-date rosters.

 

In NBA Live you easily control player movement with a left thumb d-pad while the red button on the right of the screen is for shooting or blocking and the blue button is for passing or stealing depending whether you’re on offense or defense.  If you swipe up, down, left or right on the blue button you can make some nifty behind the back dribbles or spin moves and if you swipe on the red button while your player is in a green circle dunking zone you can unleash different dunks.  Free throws are handled with a back and forth movement of the accelerometer.  It all works well and there are basic and advanced tutorials that will have you slamming monster jams and performing crossovers in no time.  

The player animations and graphics are very nice for a handheld game but what really stands out are the close-up replays you get on the more spectacular plays.  It’s here that you can see some pretty realistic movement on some of the better known players like Dwight Howard’s dunks or Kobe’s behind the back dribble.  In fact, a lot of the players moves seem to be modeled on actual game footage as you can actually recognize Labron’s dribbling style or Nowitzki’s jumper.

  

You can make substitutions during games and you can also make trades and sign free agents in the season mode so you can essentially create your own dream team and take them through a season.  Each player has extensive performance stats that determine their effectiveness.  There are also unlockables like taking the Boston Celtics through the playoffs will unlock Larry Bird while taking the Lakers, of course will unlock Magic.

There is a clipboard for you to run some basic plays (pick-and-roll, three-pointer, isolation) if you like, but much of the game play involves driving to the basket and throwing down dunks or shooting 3‘s.  There are some collision detection problems as players will seem to go through each other or throw down dunks through the backboard.
The most noticeable foul is that the game doesn’t seem to recognize the court lines as you can dribble behind the basket or over the sidelines without being called for OB.

  

You can view the game from either baseline or sideline and adjust AI difficulty and penalties to easy, medium or hard.  There’s nice in-game crowd noise to go along with the familiar voice of Marv Albert and also a good between game soundtrack by Matt and Kim, Snoop Dogg and Xzibit.

NBA Live 10 is a 4 star game that’s easy to control, full-featured and lets you play with recognizable stars of the NBA on your Iphone.


Reviewed by goyami@comcast.net