For someone who has spent literal dozens of thousands of hours playing the Football Manager games (hell, I’m playing it as I’m writing this review), the idea behind Pro Basketball Manager 2022 sounded very promising. From what I could see before its actual release, it felt like, well, FM, the utterly addictive football managing simulator which has sucked more time out of my life than walking with my dog. They had games similar for basketball, a sport I also love, but so far have forced to deal with shady outings by 2K in order to have fun with in the video game realm. Was this going to be the MyGM solution I’ve been hoping for?

The problem with these lower-budgeted sports management games usually lies in their databases. If you cannot offer a sizeable database of players in a complex-but-intuitive management gameplay loop, you’re done for. If you cannot offer a large database, do your best to offer an editor or a foundation for the Steam Workshop community to solve these issues for you. This is why Football Manager has been a success for years and why We Are Football basically died on arrival.

Pro Basketball Manager 2022 has the intuitive gameplay and every single nook and cranny you would expect from the basketball version of my favorite sports-themed spreadsheet simulator. You hire and trade players, plan your weekly training schedules, handle contracts, and so on. I really like how you can automatically decide how many minutes a player will play per match, streamlining the entire experience, not forcing you to manually substitute each player all the single time. I mean, you can still do that, but you can allocate your time in more important tasks, such as tactics and strategic timeouts.

The game itself is a bunch of clean and streamlined spreadsheets, as expected, with its own polygonal match simulation, running on Unity. I’d be lying if I said these polygonal models looked impressive (they sure don’t), but just like in Football Manager, I don’t really care. I’m here for the results and the simulation, not the graphical realism. That’s what NBA 2K, as shady as it is with its microtransactions, is for. The menus are intuitive enough, but the game does suffer from a surprising amount of glitches, not only on where you would normally expect (player animations), but also when trying to load a page or randomly freezing when clicking on a player. I get why that happens often in FM, as I’m simulating a database with around one hundred fifty thousand footballers, but that shouldn’t happen in a basketball sim with a fraction of the roster size.

Speaking of rosters, the “vanilla” version of Pro Basketball Manager 2022 features a ton of leagues, hundreds of them to be precise. You can manage both male and female teams, as well as becoming the coach for a national team in tandem with your club job. With that being said, this is the typical low-budget game that didn’t have a lot of money to pay for licensing fees. When it comes to real team names, players and logos, you’re limited to the French league. Every other team, league and player features fictional names.

Normally, that would have been an issue. Hell, it was a dealbreaker for me when playing We Are Football. Unlike THQ Nordic’s attempt at delivering a sports management simulator, however, Pro Basketball Manager 2022 has an estabilished community stemming from its predecessors. Bless them, for there was a readily available, easy-to-download datapack on Steam Workshop pretty much immediately after the game’s release. Every single team name, every single NBA player, everything was there, giving me that jolt of immersion I want from games like this. And with that, I proceeded to spend a lot of time with Pro Basketball Manager 2022, all while dealing with its lack of sound and some occasional yet annoying interface issues along the way.

Calling Pro Basketball Manager 2022 “basically Football Manager, but with basketball” is not criticism. It’s possibly the best compliment a game like this can get. If you love the sport, love its intricacies, but don’t exactly like playing it, Umix Studios has the game for you. Unlike other low budget management sims out there, the fact Pro Basketball Manager 2022 has a dedicated community shoving out datapacks and mods at a staggering pace fixes any licensing-related issues that plague these smaller titles. Go for it, Pro Basketball Manager 2022 is a good one. I’m waiting for someone to add the Tune Squad and the Monstars, though.

 

Graphics: 6.5 Even if its 3D engine isn’t the most dazzling (on the contrary), I like Pro Basketball Manager 2022‘s clean menu and interface designs. In a game like this, the mundane menu’s visuals are actually more important than the athletes themselves.	Gameplay: 8.5 If you like Football Manager, then you’re in for a very similar experience. Sadly, there are some glitches here and there, with the game stuttering and freezing at random, even with a small database.
Sound: 3.0 It’s basically mute on menus, with just some crowd noise when you’re simulating a match.	Fun Factor: 8.0 By no means the most polished sports management experience out on the market, but it features every single nook and cranny necessary to immerse you into your own personal basketball management story. Not to mention the datapacks available at Steam Workshop.
Final Verdict: 7.5

Pro Basketball Manager 2022 is available now on PC.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Pro Basketball Manager 2022 was provided by the publisher.