Review: NBA Street Homecourt (X360)

NBA Street Homecourt is a funky, frantic and fun take on a team sports game.

Achievements: Easy

Pros: Fast and funky gameplay; great sound track; top quality graphics and animation; career mode is well defined and addictive

Cons: XBL dumps you out after matches; defending is quite tough; poor manual and no tutorials

NBA Street Homecourt is an arcade-style take on the game of basketball and features no-holds-barred matches with the emphasis on tricks, combos and spectacular dunks. Matches feature 3 vs 3 basketball, on various homecourts (local park and sports halls), where you pull off various tricks & combos to both score baskets and build up a Game Breaker meter. Once filled, the GameBreaker allows you to pull of ‘uber’ tricks for bonus points and extra baskets.

The Homecourt Challenge play mode adds basic RPG elements to the game that allow you to create a custom player and build a team to take on various challenges around a US homecourt circuit. Beating each of the challenges boosts your player’s stats and allows you to buy bonus items plus recruit better team mates. The Homecourt Challenge is a lot of fun and the RPG elements work really well, drawing you further into the game.

XBL play is good fun; even when Scooby beats you 10-0. The game play is fluid and there are none of the usual lag issues that effect other sports games (e.g. PES). Strangely, in a private match the game dumps you back to the menu after the game. Tiger Woods does this as well, so I think this is a deliberate ploy by EA to make you use their pointless lobby system.

The graphics are superb and everything is given a sepia-tone wash which adds the the 70’s retro feel of the game (the sound track also features many 70s ghetto funk tunes). The player models are excellent with detailed textures, including sweat, whist the animations and crazy moves are fluid and fast. The sound is also good, with the players shouting instructions and taunts that form a key part of the play: for example, they will alert you to a combo move. The sound track is superb, even if it borrows a couple of tunes from Tiger Woods, and features an eclectic mix of modern Hip-Hop and 70’s Funk (I’m love 70’s ghetto funk so I might be biased).

The multiple play-modes, XBL and a fairly lengthy Homecourt Challenge make NBA-S-H good value for money. The achievements are well designed and promote the full use of the game’s tricks and moves. It might be said, however, that they are a little on the easy side.

NBA Street Homecourt is a very good game and a nice alternative to the usual 360 fare. You do not have to like basketball to enjoy the game (I don’t); and to be honest it is about as far removed form basketball as you can get. If you enjoyed the film White Men Can’t Jump, and fancy yourself as a “court king”, then NBA Street Homecourt might well be right up your street!

8/10