The new 2K is upon us and what we need to know is if 2K20 brings anything new to the table.

2K still has its Play Now, My Team, My Career and My League features. 2K has also added the WNBA into Play Now and My League. The WNBA is not as fully involved in My League as the NBA. The WNBA does not allow users to do any trades during the season. The only way to improve a roster is to sign free agents. But, the free agents that are possible to sign do not contribute much to a successful roster.

The highest ranked free agent, Kiah Stokes, is 72 overall. This overall is so low that the CPU would not give her any minutes on if she was on any team in the league. Therefore, there is no real way to improve the WNBA roster if you were looking forward to that new feature. There is also no scouting to do during the season because there is no offseason in the WNBA! So, you would only be able to lead a current team to a championship without any way to improve that roster and not be able to move on to the following season. Even though this feature was not highly anticipated, it does not seem like too much work to add in an offseason since the 2K has those features with the NBA.

Under Play Now, the only new option is Play WNBA. There is still Quick Play, NBA Today, Play Now Online, 2KU, Black Top and Play with Friends Online. One different aspect of Quick Play, and playing any NBA or WNBA game in general, is the way to change the uniforms worn during the games. Instead of just pressing “Y” to alternate through each uniform option, you will press “Y” and see the uniforms on the team’s best player. You can change an individual jersey, like the shorts, arm sleeves and head band, or change to a completely different whole uniform, like the statement jerseys or any other past jersey the teams wore. The image of the player is very similar to how NBA Live shows the jersey options on players.

In this year’s My Career, you will play as Che, the nickname of your player who is in his Senior year and starts off as an “under the radar prospect” for the Bay City Flames. You will play one game for this college team. Late in the game, your teammate, Porter, gets hit with a cheap shot and ends up having a torn ACL, PCL, and dislocated patella. Porter is unable to play in the upcoming tournament and the coach, Idris Elba, takes his scholarship away. Outraged by this, your character, Che, opts not to play in the tournament in protest of Porter’s scholarship being taken away. This makes your coach irate and creates bad blood between the two of you.

You will have Che play one-on-one against an NBA player, which is determined by whether you say Che lives in New York, LA, Chicago or St. Louis, then play a random five-on-five game. After that, you will go to a scrimmage where Scottie Pippen gives the crowd a pep talk before the game and passes around one of his NBA rings. This moment is supposed to be inspiring to Che.

The next event is where you and your roommate, a top international NBA prospect with whom you share an agent, play with and against current NBA stars like Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Demar Derozan, and Paul George. Then comes the ultimate test: The NBA Combine.

After that, you pick the top 3 teams you would like to play for. You will work out for each team with other prospects they are looking to draft. Each of these drills will boost your draft stock and make more teams interested in you. Like in real life, where you get drafted affects how much you earn per game.

An undrafted projection will get you no VC per game, while a late second round projection will give you 200 to 400 VC per game. A mid-second round projection will give you 400 to 600 VC per game and an early second round projection will give you 600 to 800 VC per game. But a late first round projection will give you 800 to 1000 VC per game and a solid first round projection will give you 1000 to 1200 VC per game. You will never go up two of these projection rankings after one drill. At most, you would be promoted by one projection rating at a time. Che will then be drafted to his team which is revealed when he comes out with his new jersey lying on the table in front of him during his post draft interview. From then on, regardless of where you get drafted, you will start your rookie year on a one-year deal.

My League has had almost no improvements. 2K put a new look onto the Offseason with how it appears, but each step you click on goes exactly the same as last year. They did finally update most pictures that go with each step, but that was simple and long overdue. I give them no credit for that.

That being said, they did update My GM. There is now a spider web looking GM tree where you can unlock attributes like being able to chat with players and unlock the trade finder. The trade finder is a function used in franchise where you can select a player or draft pick and see what other teams would trade for your selected attribute. That is the only improvement: a web! There are also annoying ads during the game. If you decide to “chat” with players to boost their morale, they may talk about something like Taco Bell which is obviously just a way to use a paid promotion for them.

Students have also complained that the dribbling is very slow, loading takes forever, and that, compared to 2K19, 2K20 is basically the same game. Since there are not many changes to this edition of 2K, it might be unappealing to someone who already owns 2K19.