It is now clear: Apple Arcade wants to pamper the many basketball fans present among its users; and so here we are grappling with the NBA 2K23 Arcade Edition, the new edition of the basketball simulator signed by Visual Concepts, which arrives on Apple's subscription platform exactly one year after the 2022 version.

As is traditional for sports titles, the first question that arises is what are the news and changes made to the experience. Well, the answer comes as soon as you take a look at the game's main screen, which features some new modes. What exactly is it about? We explain it to you in the NBA 2K23 Arcade Edition review.

Structure

Let's start with the contents of NBA 2K23 and its modalities. By selecting the Play Now item on the start screen, you can access the inevitable quick match, a tutorial, the urban Blacktop mode (which we already appreciated in the last edition) and online multiplayer, also an essential appointment for every sportsman who is respectful, mobile or not.

Then there are three other main options, starting with MyCareer, the full-bodied career that fans of the 2K Games series know very well and which allows you to create your own player and then face a calendar of events that gradually becomes denser and more demanding. In this way, trying to gradually introduce ourselves to the mechanics and philosophy underlying the experience.

We then have The Greatest mode, which involves the biggest stars of basketball in a sort of tournament complete with bonuses and direct challenges: great for long-time fans; and The Association mode, which presents itself as a sort of managerial career in which we will have the task of creating a team and managing its players to make them improve from match to match, establishing themselves within the championship.

In short, on the offer front, NBA 2K23 may appear reduced compared to the console version but it remains a distinctly premium, full-bodied production, far from a generic mobile approach designed for rapid and impromptu use: we are talking about a game that aims to entertain for long sessions, to which you can devote a reasonable amount of time.

Gameplay

Like the vast majority of titles in the Apple Arcade catalog, the new edition of basketball produced by 2K Games supports Bluetooth controllers and it goes without saying that using this type of device allows you to enjoy the solid and multifaceted gameplay developed by Visual Concepts, once again well balanced between realism and immediacy.

However, if you are around and you have to opt for touch controls, another novelty of this edition is the double layout that can be selected from the options: the first is equipped with five buttons on the right side of the screen, which allows you to run each type of action and to control the game in a complete way, while the second uses a total of three keys, one of which is "universal", which changes function depending on the context.

Fortunately, the responsiveness of the players has been improved and we no longer have the feeling that the inputs are not readily received by the system, but we imagine that this speed may also depend on the terminal used for the review, an iPhone 14 Pro that allows you to set all the values ??relating to the graphics to the maximum.

In short, the system is very solid and even, in this case, there is no shadow of microtransactions: another difference, undoubtedly positive, compared to the console edition of NBA 2K23, linked to the conditions established by Apple for its subscription platform.

Technical realization

On the technical front, it is not easy to identify specific improvements compared to last year's edition. Let's be clear: the graphics of NBA 2K23 Arcade Edition are excellent and very close to that of the "major" edition, both in terms of the complexity of the polygonal models and the set of animations available to them. Perhaps the effects betray the mobile nature of the experience, but the glance remains remarkable.

A similar argument can be made for the sound, which includes a fairly complete commentary that we can further enrich by downloading a separate package, as well as a set of sounds and music that are functional to the action.

NBA 2K23 is in stores now for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. NBA2king also is a Legit and Safe NBA 2K23 MT Store.