NBA The Run may not be the most feature-packed basketball game, but its strong gameplay may be able keep us engaged — if we’re ready to only play online for now.
NBA The Run is an interesting undertaking as a sports title. It has 3v3 street ball at its core, but that core is nearly covered up by the need to always be online live service. The game wants us to be able to play a fast-paced game of basketball, and wants us to get into it quickly without the need to set almost anything, and to do so its just easier to let the servers handle it. This low barrier to entry, both in gameplay and setup, is admirable, and it really does feel like the developers, Play By Play, want everyone who plays it to easily get it.
And by that measure it succeeds. It has simple play, and lite content, and does so because sometimes we just want to push START and throw the rock at the hoop.
So why be online? Well because there’s nothing else that really happens outside of a few quick games; NBA The Run does one thing, it does it well, but at the detriment of feeling like there’s a reason to come back more than a handful of times.
The game currently has one mode, a knock-out tournament, that pits either solo players or squads as they make their way through a few rounds in hopes of being crowned champs. There seems to always be players available, as I’ve never really had to wait for anyone to start a match in our tournaments, and using rollback netcode means that the game has some incredibly smooth online play.
My go-to team always includes some combination of Cade Cunningham and Wemby alongside a third, usually a sharpshooter like Steph Curry that has Deep Threat as their Zone Ability. This gives me players who can both take over a game and prevent the other team from doing so. Cade always seems to be in the right spot at the right time, Wemby always blocks everything in the paint, and Steph can launch them from beyond half court without fail.
It’s arcadey, and is VERY easy to shoot and score and play and move around the court. I can appreciate how the developers have made this extremely responsive; the small-ish street ball court is quick to get from one end to the other, even with someone as lanky as Wemby, in case I want to try and get to the ball as fast as possible. It’s designed around the basics of pick up and play basketball, which we all played at recess or after school or in our driveways, so there aren’t a whole ton of rules to get in the way. Again, Play By Play just want us to sink those shots, man. There are some nice touches, too, like really elaborately detailed courts and arcade-influenced animations in our shots, and some really fun little vocals that get shouted out when we nail a sick shot or a slam.
Each game is quick, only to 21 points, and kicks off with randomized rules that make it so that we need to stay on our toes whenever we play our next opponent. There are some rulesets where three pointers are more valuable, or dunks, or shots worth only half, or even style points being earned for dunks or other plays. This is why it’s important to have a good variety of players in our team. In one run it seemed like I only had extra points off of distance shots activated for most of the matches, which sucked because I was focusing on Wemby and Lebron as my centerpiece combo. In another I had a good variety of rulesets pop up, so my specific team loadout didn’t quite matter as much because all I had to do was survive that current opponent and the next may have had a more friendly set of modifiers.
But all of that is done against other live players. We cannot play on the couch, in the same house, on the same TV with family or friends. We can’t do anything outside of the tournament apart from upgrading our players outfits or unlocking a couple of variations based on whatever credits we’ve earned from our runs. And then we play another tournament with maybe a few different players, and that’s… it.
If we want to just play basketball, NBA The Run makes it easy to select some of our favorite star players and jump right in, playing a fun, solid arcade experience. We turn it on and we’re playing RIGHT AWAY. I can respect the game for what it does well in that respect, but right now there’s not enough outside of that to keep me on the court.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for June 18, 2026.
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