Considering how popular basketball is, and the fact that the NBA is surprisingly lenient when it comes to licensing its brand to basically anyone with enough money to do so, I wonder why NBA 2K is still, for all intents and purposes, the only basketball gaming franchise around. EA’s NBA Live has been dead for the past half decade or so, and whilst NBA Playgrounds was promising, with its arcadey gameplay reminiscent of the classic NBA Jam, its emphasis on microtransactions made people give up on it quite quickly. If you’re a kid or a newcomer, you gotta shell out money on an NBA 2K game, which is not the ideal option for these demographics. Enter Outright Games, known publisher of family-friendly, licensed content, with what can be seen as some kind of a solution: NBA Bounce.

NBA Bounce is exactly that: a family-friendly, easy-going basketball videogame with a really simple gameplay loop, and some NBA licensing to back it up. Sadly, the licensing is limited to the teams’ visual indentities and mascots, so you’re not going to get kid Luka Donic and kid Shai Gilgeous-Alexander performing flying dunks or special moves. It’s just random kids (you can create some avatars, by the way), and you can unlock the mascot of each team in a simple career mode.

It’s 3-on-3, unlike NBA Jam. There’s also a criminal lack of “Boom-Shakalakas”.

If you’re creative enough, you can make a squad that somewhat resembles the image of the team you’re playing as (for instance, a Boston Celtics squad with leprechaun-esque players or green folk). Again, considering it’s a game for kids, giving them a bit of room to unleash their creativity is not exactly a bad thing. I gotta think that I’m not the target audience in this case – it’s disappointing to me, but newcomers and kids won’t care at all about the lack of proper licenses. And you can still re-create players on the editor if that’s really what you want.

But what really matters is if a game like this is arcadey, easy to pick up and play, and is reponsive. Even if NBA Bounce is very lacklustre in terms of very simple presentation, when it comes to its gameplay, I really can’t complain about it. It’s arcadey like NBA Jam, as easy to pick up as that classic, but it’s a 3-on-3 game instead. It’s also less, uh, “radical”. It’s got very simplified controls and physics, but considering the target audience, I’d say that’s a good thing. Controls are responsive, and you can learn all of the game’s mechanics in just a few minutes. It’s not hard to steal a ball, the shot meter is readable, and you can even perform some interesting assist combos.

Controls are easy to learn, the framerate is solid, the gameplay is fast and fluid. It’s just not very impressive to look at.

What you have here is a very stripped down basketball game. It’s not detailed, doesn’t look amazing (though it runs at a phenomenal framerate), but for the intended audience, I think NBA Bounce is a pretty good entry port for newcomers and kids. What really matters is that it’s easygoing, responsive, completely devoid of microtransactions, and great to pick up and play. It’s not the replacement or spiritual successor to NBA Jam we certainly need and deserve, but as a little arcade basketball game, I gotta say, I had my fair share of fun with it, and can easily recommend it to its intended target audience without an issue.

NBA Bounce is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB and Asus ROG Ally.

A copy of NBA Bounce was provided by the publisher.