Freestyle 2: Street Basketball Review

Developer: Joycity

Publisher: Joycity

Format: PC

Released: 1. April 2015 (Steam)

Freestyle 2: Street Basketball is, as you may guess from the name, a street basketball game. It is developed and published by Joycity, a South Korean game developer.

As far as I can tell from the 14 hours or so that I have played the game is not highly advanced. But I would imagine that it has more depth later on in the game, as you get more moves and also get better with basketball strategies. Something that can be really useful is to screen the enemy players, but it can be bad too if you mess up, as there is a delay before you can move again.

The game focuses largely on teamplay, although it is possible to just keep the ball to yourself, but don’t do that, that isn’t fun for anyone. If you manage to communicate with your team in a good way, it is unlikely that you will loose, although you do have to at least know the basic game mechanics.

From the start you are fairly limited to what you can do. You can shoot, pass, drive or sprint and if close enough you can dunk or do a layup. As you progress through the game you unlock new skills, all that builds on these core mechanics. You may unlock the skill to change to direction of a drive, pass to a specific player or special shooting methods like fadeaway that are harder to block.

As for game modes the game has team, individual and tournament. The team games consists of two teams with three players on each team and one basket. The team with the ball has to get the ball outside the 3point line to be able to score. The individual mode works the exact same way, expect that your two teammates are AI and not real people. As for the tournament mode, I have not tried it, because there are no way you will play in a tournament at level 12. I would believe that you will have to get to level 50 which is max level, to play in a tournament.

For the most part Freestyle 2: Street Basketball is skill based, but unfortunately it sometime comes down to numbers. Sometimes, you just miss a shot that you just should have gone in the basket. For example you can be completely open, no one in front of the basket and time the shot perfectly on the power bar, but it still somehow misses , which is rather unsatisfying. But I guess it is realistic in a way, I mean, it’s not like someone who just started out playing basketball scores on every shot he takes, but i would like to see the power bar designed in another way. For example they could have it like if you hit the green part of the power bar the shot goes in, and then have the bar dynamically change relative to your distance from the basket and players around you.

As you level up you also get skill points, which you can spend them on a variety of different skills such as, shots, layups, stamina and so on. I don’t know if these skills affect the power bar in any way, but if not I would like to see that implemented in a similar fashion as i mentioned above.

Having played the game for about 14 hours, I have leveled up one character to level 12. I am certain that it would be possible to do it a bit faster, but not a whole lot. You could of course buy double exp boosters, or sponsors, as they are called in the game. I even had that for a bit, as I got one from a level up gift. If I had just played individual I would think that I could have done it quicker, since you get the same amount of exp from an individual game as a team game. Especially considering that I often had problems finding anyone to play with, sometimes taking more than five minutes just to play a five minute game. But of course it is not that fun, just playing by yourself, so if you get a couple of friends together and make a team you can have some great fun!

Freestyle 2 works fairly well with a keyboard, although I would think that it is better on a controller, but I don’t have one so I have not tested it. One problem I do have with the controls is the fact that multiple actions is bound to the same key. I can see why developers does this on consoles, as the controllers don’t have that many buttons. But with a keyboard this is not the case, I would love it if you could bind shoot, dunk, and layup to different buttons. I think that would make you feel way more in control, as the character would not suddenly just stop and shoot, when you wanted to go for a dunk, or the other way around.

Which I mentioned earlier, I happened to play a lot of individual during my play time, which means that I played with, and against AI. For the most part the AI seems at least competent, but sometimes it just utterly stupid. For example when I have a center position AI on my team, and he is supposed to take the rebound, and then just starts running to the side of the screen. Or when the AI fails to pick up the ball three times in a row! or tries to shoot but misses three times in a row, without even trying to pass the ball to an open teammate. But as I said, for the most part the AI works fairly well, but it is annoying when it happens though.

As far as the business model goes it’s quite good it seems. For the most part it is only cosmetic items you can buy with real money, and nothing that really affects you character. But one thing to note is that at level 12 you unlock the feature to create level 12 characters. As much as I like this feature, not having to level up every character from level 1, I’m not to keen on the idea that you have to use real money to do so. The currency you buy with real money is not what I would consider cheap, 2000 points costs 20$, and when you consider that some of the characters cost 2000 points to get at level 12 it’s suddenly 20$ for a character.

So, to a conclusion. I would say that I have enjoyed my time with Freestyle 2: Street Basketball. Even though it do have some problems such as a little inconsistent AI, and what I would call rather expensive microtransactions, I think it’s a decent game. I like the skill and team based gameplay, although there are some small problems there too, but nothing major. And if you play a lot, I am quite sure that you will learn some basketball stuff too, like strategies and techniques. I guess that’s about it, I hope you liked this review and I’ll see you next time.

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Important notice

As of now it is not possible to play Freestyle 2: Street basketball on Windows 10. This is also the reason why I don’t have any pictures in this review. I wrote the review first and intended to take screenshots afterwards, but since i upgraded my OS it is not yet possible. However I have read that Joycity will patch this problem on the 19th of August, and I will update the review as fast as I can after this patch.