NBA: The Run Is Exactly The Game EA Sports BIG Fans Have Been Waiting For

The history of sports gaming has highlighted the many ways real-life games can be translated to a digital space. NBA 2K is a technically impressive and deeply committed approach to bringing the most realistic basketball experience to gamers — while arcade classics like NBA Jam or NBA Street threw out all the realism and instead doubled down on bombastic dunks for the fun of it. Both games have their place in the sports genre, but the former has become the de facto approach, while games like the latter often come and go with little fanfare.

Hopefully, that trend will change for NBA: The Run, which has proven to be an ideal title for fans of those older arcade-style sports games like NBA Street. With a more stylish approach to the visuals and a looser take on the players themselves, NBA: The Run makes each playable character — and by extension, each player — a powerhouse on the court. With the game’s preview to members of the gaming press (including ComicBook) highlighting that heightened pace and vivid sense of style, NBA: The Run looks like the kind of sports game arcade fans have been waiting years for.

NBA: The Run Brings Back The Thrill Of Arcade Sports

NBA: The Run is a throwback sports arcade experience that’s perfect for anyone who still misses the NBA Street series. The game will be primarily a multiplayer experience, with players choosing certain NBA players to take to the court and try to earn the respect of the rest of the league. The games will be fast-paced 3v3 showdowns, with a simple playstyle that makes it easy for anyone to learn the basics. However, the game’s underlying depth promises to be a more enticing challenge for dedicated sports gamers, with key strategies and clever tricks being core to outsmarting your opponent. That’s on top of the game’s focus on giving each of the 32 confirmed NBA players in the roster their own unique attributes and abilities.

Rules and bonuses can randomize between games, giving the multiplayer experience a touch of a rougelike style that suggests the developers want to avoid any sense of repetition that could grow while playing fast-paced games in a row. The idea is that each game can be easily picked up, but that no shootout or dunk will feel quite the same. There’s a quick pace and a vivid sense of color underscoring all of The Run‘s action on the court, making for a game that’s easy on the eyes without being too taxing on your hardware. It all lends itself to a quick-paced and engaging multiplayer game where learning the opponent’s possible moves and the advantages of their chosen players is just as important as actually handling the ball or sinking some well-placed shots.

NBA: The Run Is The New NBA Street I’ve Been Waiting Decades For

Play by Play Studios has been working on The Run for over five years, beginning development on a game that was meant to bring players back to that feeling of pick-up gameplay that has been lost in the genre’s larger embrace of sims that look to fully replicate the sport in question. Years into development, the NBA found out about the game — and threw their full weight behind it, transforming the street-level game of custom characters into a colorful ode to some of the best basketball players on the court today. Redubbed NBA: The Run, the game embraces that connection to the league and thrives when it lets players push their favorite stars to absurd limits.

The development has been notably led by people like Mike Young, who had previously worked on several of the EA Sports BIG titles before spending over a decade as the creative director on the Madden series. During a brief chat with members of the press, Young noted how he also missed the fast-paced fun of arcade sports games, prompting him to join development on NBA: The Run. In many ways, the game does feel like a spiritual successor to NBA Street, albeit in an era where always-online games like Fortnite have shifted approaches in multiplayer games.

NBA: The Run emphasizes multiplayer, whether that be bringing a squad together for your own team or facing off with players from across the world with your ideal trio. The roster is even set to expand in some creative ways, like letting players utilize certain athletes at different points in their careers (which in turn comes with different skills and unique abilities). While the game might not have the single-player depth that something like NBA Street 2 benefited from, NBA: The Run is a welcome return for a gameplay style that plenty of fans (including this writer) have been missing for years. While there’s still plenty of room for accurate sports sim games, NBA: The Run highlights just how much fun we’ve been missing by keeping the game primarily in massive stadiums instead of on asphalt courts.