When you think of sim-style games, you think of names like Out of the Park Baseball and Football Manager.
Those titles have done a tremendous job at giving gamers the experience of controlling and managing their own team by being detail-orientated and easy to work with. However, there are other sim-style games out there, and today we here at SGO will give our review of Wolverine Sports’ Draft Day Sports Pro Basketball 2019.
Draft Day Sports Pro Basketball 2019
In Draft Day Sports, the user, like in most sim-style games, takes control of a team and tries to form the best possible squad in order to win championships. Draft Day Sports is a basketball sim game, with the user getting to choose one of 30 teams at the starting point. This game is geared towards NBA fans, however, due to copyright restrictions, teams in the game do not go by their real-life names. So as an example, instead of names such as the Knicks and the Lakers, those names are replaced with the Metros and the Waves.
Players have multiple options at their disposal once starting a game, as one can choose “Challenge Mode”, where the player must meet the demands of the owner in order to retain their job. If you want to play at a casual pace, then consider the “Sandbox Mode”, where there’s no risk of being fired. Players can also set up a mutliplayer league to challenge friends and see who’s the best at being a general manager.
Once in the game, players can then begin the process of making trades, simming games, signing free agents and crafting that perfect team. Like most sim-style games, you can’t actually play any of the games, but instead can slow sim and manage the game minute by minute or quick sim to move ahead at a faster pace.
The Good
Arguably the game’s biggest strength is giving the user the ability to customize the game. Whether it is changing the team name, to downloading draft classes and historical rosters, the game does provide the user with many ways to create a fun and creative playthrough. Players can even download rosters and draft classes straight off of Wolverine Studios’ forums. I know some people will want accurate rosters in these type of games, but sometimes this isn’t possible for whatever reasons. Having customization like this is a nice alternative.
Another positive is that the simulation does play up in an accurate manner. What I mean by that is this: trades for top players aren’t easy, high-end talent outperform inferior players. If great players don’t play as well as other ones who have worse attributes, that’s a major problem. Luckily that’s isn’t all too much of an issue here.
Lastly, presentation is also pretty good. It’s pretty easy to navigate through the home screen to find your player rotations, team stats as well as the league standings and other tools you may need during a playthrough.
What Could Be Improved
Customization is a strength in this game. However, one of my biggest pet peeves in this games was the inability to create custom strategies for your team to deploy in-game. Other sim-style games as Out of the Park Baseball do a strong job at creating custom sliders so that you can set what your team to do. In this game, only pre-set strategies are available. That irked me a bit because, for instance, if I want my team to be a little less focused on post up shots, I’d like to move a slider in order to do so. Giving players more control over their team’s play should be given in order to make a more enjoyable experience.
Secondly, the simulation can be rather slow. Now look, I get it, being a general manager means attention to detail and taking things slowly. However, this game needs to give players the ability to quickly get through games in order to provide a much more quality experience for those who want to go fast. When testing the simulation, I had the game’s sim at the fastest setting possible, and still took a while just to get through a month.
Verdict
While it may look rough when you start given that Draft Day Sports does not include any NBA team names, logos and accurate rosters, it actually isn’t all bad with some work. DDS Pro Basketball 2019 can be quite a fun game, but just keep in mind that you can’t actually play games.
Note: Wolverine Studios provided a code for review of this game