NBA The Run Review, Gameplay Impressions, Videos and Top Features

NBA The Run from developer Play by Play Studios has been a long time coming. 

A spiritual successor to the beloved NBA Street series from the early 2000s, The Run is a three-on-three streetball effort that attempts to bring the niche back to life with modern trappings. 

Given the success of community-based streetball games modes in things like the NBA 2K series, it's certainly a worthwhile and obtainable goal these days. 

How the anticipated return balances what made the classics great with modern game design, though, will determine its success and staying power. 

Graphics and Gameplay

The Run is an international love letter to hoops. 

A vibrant, stylish ode to streetball, every game across a variety of spots around the world feels like a celebration happening around the on-court action. It's a looker, no doubt, with a fun announcer and overall sound design to punctuate the entire experience. 

Locations and vibe were always critical in the NBA Street series. Same deal here, with the international spread of locations, including some old favorites like New York and Venice, returning with eye-popping background and detail. 

Critically, The Run nails its arcade-like gameplay: Controls are snappy and responsive. The stars feel like stars. There's strategic depth too as those juggernauts feel true to themselves: Steph Curry can hit a shot from anywhere, but get a hand in his face and he's easily blocked. Force Wemby out of the paint and he's going to have some problems. There's a huge difference in building a team around a Damian Lillard compared to a Nikola Jokic. 

The Run is more than happy to lean into the arcade vibe with random modifiers too. Some games, dunks are worth more. Others, three-pointers. 

It's a nice mixup that fits the theme well, considering kids around the world walk into a park and make up rules as they go for fun. Same deal here, but with distinct-feeling stars and replayable fun. 

Game modes and more

The Run splits into three basic game modes. Squads lets players control one streetballer on the team, Solos lets them control all three at once and Friends is a basic private lobby against AI or up to 48 players. 

This is where the problems start. Not major problems, but The Run, like many sports titles, pales in comparison to its game-mode packed predecessors of long ago. 

What isn't here is tough to ignore. There's no story mode or solo campaign. No major background info on the handful of fictional streetball legends in the game. Nor is there a create-a-baller mode for those who want to inject themselves into the game. 

And hey, this isn't the early 2000s with the And1 Mixtape Tour going wild while The Professor and Escalade make waves and inspire the games. There's something to be said for trying to lean into modern gaming trends. Take the popular The Park NBA 2K stuff, meld it with NBA Street and see what happens. 

But it winds up feeling a little barebones. Grinding through courts against streetball legends and pros and improving and ultimately winning it all was a staple of the Street series back in the day. 

As constructed, The Run encourages players to keep playing and exploring the entire roster and the archetypes present. But it all starts to blur together after a little while, too, almost fittingly akin to scrolling on a social media platform. 

In the modern age, there's always room for more updates to smooth over issues with post-launch support. As a plus, the game runs silky smooth, matchmaking is quick and like top fighting games, there's even rollback netcode.

Conclusion

As expected and hoped for, The Run is fantastic pick-up-and-play fun. 

There's some unexpected strategy to the whole thing too, given the careful attention paid to recreating the likeness of each global superstar in arcade form. 

The internet and fans as a whole will have a hard time not comparing it to the Street games and what it's missing. But what has made the cut is a blast and quite accessible for bite-sized gaming sessions. 

Like any sports game these days, solid post-launch support could make the difference for The Run. But it's easy to see this first effort being a hit that creates plenty of follow-up dunks at the rim in time.