62.6 hours played
Written 7 years ago
This game is a great concept backed with a deep in-game coaching system, and an excellent database editor, however it falls on its face mainly due to a plethora of game breaking glitches, and a poor English translation.
The game is largely text based, with you weeding through a series of menus, which is to be expected. The menus are easy to navigate, and it's a breeze to find specific players through the deep searching and recruiting system. However, these menus and some team objectives can be confusing sometimes, as the English translations don't quite make sense sometimes. The music and sound are laughable, as the menu music is 8 songs by the same guy, and the in game sound is literally 4 poorly done sound effects on a slate of awkward silence. You can manage one pro club and one national team at one time. There are tons of playable leagues to select from, with differing rules and competition formats. However, I've found that the game slows to a crawl if your simulation is less than 4 stars in speed. Managing the team(s) can take quite a good deal of time, as you'll be spending your time not only managing and coaching the team, but also dealing with finances and international scouting. The scouts are good for getting some ratings on players, however they seem to misjudge potential horribly, even with a five star scout. During the live simulations, you have the options of viewing the action in a 2D 2k simcast live-esque view, or a very janky and basic 3D view, which I actually preferred. You can choose from a wide variety of options for your offense and defense, and even run specific plays!
PBM2017 has many deep customization options available for the player. You can edit everything from players, to coaches, all the way down to the team's financial budget and what languages the player speaks. If you think of it, you can probably edit it, which is really awesome. However, I found it a bit strange that to upload a custom logo, you had to do it thorugh some file digging, a peculiar omission when you can edit just about anything else you can think up. I found myself mainly using the editor to correct the weird translations to names. You'll be seeing a lot of "Dava Millur"s and "Carlas Boozars" for players with English names, partly I believe to avoid a lawsuit from NBA players. These tools are definitely use-at-your-own-risk, as I've discovered a bunch of problems that seem to have resulted from this tool.
Player interaction is limited to "scout player", "contract offer" or "add to tracking list". Players don't seem to have negative chemistry, and will stay happy if you keep the training balanced. Progression is really good, and you can definitely tell the difference when you train a specific attribute. I even boosted up a few players in my humble euro league team to the point they eventually got drafted by the NBA.
Bugs: As previously stated, this game is full of bugs, which unfortunately the developer has not responded to as of one week. I'm the type of person that is ok with a few crashes here and there, and other weird, funky stuff once in awhile. So here is a list of some that I've had occur to me personally with about a week and 60 hours played, and you can decide for yourself whether you want to chance it.
Game Breakers:
The Training Glitch- Basically, you can't train your pro players, and your players are constantly out of shape and exhausted, which makes the game pretty much unplayable by the time winter rolls around and you're dropping game after game due to exhastion and slew of resulting injuries. I think I triggered this by accepting a national team offer from Cyprus, as after their season started and ended, I still cannot train my pros.
The Competitions Edit Glitch-If you use the editor to look up a competition and subsequently click on that competition page, even if you don't touch anything, will cause that league to be marked as 'non-playable' for the remainder of the season. If this happens to be the league that you are in, you will be immediately removed from the team, and unable to sign anywhere until the next season.
The Created Teams/Players Glitch- Created teams will always have 1000 seats, even if you enter a higher number on the creation page. This can lead to you being fired due to lack of revenue. Furthermore, about 4 out of 5 of the generated players on that team were unable to be signed to any kind of contract, basically making them 1-year dummies. This happened when I first started my game.
Common Non-Game Breakers:
Players from the opposing team (and on a rare occasion, yours) will make a ridiculous full court 3 pointer before the end of quarter buzzer. This happens super frequently, as I've even seen it happen twice in one game.
Music will randomly stop playing in the menus after about 3 played games. Usually means the game will crash when you play your next game.
Constant random crashes, despite being well above recommended system specs. Be sure to save OFTEN.
Endless loading bar sometimes when entering a game.
Trying to add affinities to players in the editor will cause the game to freeze, and subsequently crash.
When signing or re-signing as manager, your (owner I guess?) will take control of the roster and make a bunch of really high offers to random guys. If they do sign before they re-sign you, you will have to pay off these bum contracts. They will also take the liberty of extending these ridiculous contracts for 1-2 more years at the same or higher rate. This can get you fired for bad financial management, especially when combined with an 1000 seat arena.
If you waive a player with an expiring contract with an extension before the offseason (usually because of the above problem) you will have to pay him off, then he will be back on July 1st and you will have to pay him off again. This can sometimes kill more than half of your yearly budget.
Can't extend contract for a player with an expiring contract that is on your team, similar to the Created Team Player glitch. Other teams seem to be able to sign them however. These players in particular seem to cause the absurd contract signings by the CPU mentioned above.
Euro League 3 has playoffs and a playoff format, but never has any playoff games.
Ex-NBA scrubs that have been playing internationally for years will not even consider offers from similar teams "there's no way Carlas Boozar will sign with a GL-1 team!" then proceeds to sign with Berlin afterwards.
A bunch of pro and national teams have no coach, despite me adding a bunch of them in the editor (without assigning a team) and most are still free agents.
National team prospects seem to be random, not based on actual ratings. A bunch of decent 3-3.5 star players were from Cyprus (the national team I'm coaching) and offered me a bunch of 0-2 star players instead. So my team was a bunch of free agent guys, one signed guy, and a bunch of 15-17 year olds, since you are unable to choose prospects freely as far as I know.
In 3d simulations at 4x speed, the ball will often get stuck in place. Your players will then play with an invisble ball until the next sound effect is triggered.
Simulation dialogue says "____ shoots it" and then "Defender commits foul", yet the ball is taken from out of bounds. This happens constantly, I would say at least 10 times per game, every game.
Can't extend contract for a player with an expiring contract that is on your team, similar to the Created Team Player glitch. Other teams seem to be able to sign them however. These players in particular seem to cause the absurd contract signings by the CPU.
Anyways, in summation, this game had huge potential that is spoiled by endless glitches and a poor English translation. If the developers had waited a bit longer and ironed out these kind of issues before launch I would give this game a 7.5/10. However in its current sloppy state, I have to give it a 4.5/10, as I don't think any game should have you worried whether your