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Another year has passed and Umix and Cyanide return to offer the most famous, also because almost unique, managerial series dedicated to the world of basketball. We are talking about the Pro Basketball Managers, arrived at the third incarnation, the 2017 one.

It is a title that is aimed at a very small market niche, but still orphan of thick products, therefore theoretically receptive to novelties, also given the certainly not prohibitive price at which the product is sold (we are talking about only 19,99, € XNUMX). In short, it is an effort that enthusiasts can afford to make, even on an annual basis ... as long as they are given a valid product. The first edition, the 2015 one, left a bad taste in the mouth of many because, despite the undoubted managerial qualities, it was plagued by bugs and stability problems. The 2016 edition had improved the situation a lot but, as we will discover, it was not a good school for the 2017 edition. The game itself has remained essentially unchanged, with the same menus and the same options. The goal is always to take and manage a team from one of the many basketball leagues around the world (the roster is updated for the current season). Once we have made our selection, we will be able to decide which events to participate in, how to use the various members of the team, assigning their individual roles and choosing general tactics. We will also be able to train them, going to intervene individually where there are problems with form.

Nothing is really missing, from the management of the stadiums, with the possibility of intervening on the prices of the various seats, to the scheduling of the matches, passing through the player market, gradually up to the editor that allows you to change the roster so as to always keep up to date roses to the real situation. Among the novelties stand out the new 3D engine for meetings, which makes them more pleasant to follow (to be honest it is not exactly exceptional, but given the genre you can be satisfied) and the complete revision of scouting and recruiting, with more reactions realistic by the players and more detailed reports on the observed. In short, so far everything seems beautiful and one could even overlook the graphic poverty of the menus, which are anonymous tables with questionable chromatic choices, and the background music, often simply inappropriate. After all, who cares about these aspects when it comes to a similar title? What the managerial player wants is that it is possible to communicate to the players on the field to change tactics according to the progress of the match, or to establish the scoring, or to replace the players and so on. All this in Pro Basketball Manager 2017 can actually be done, if it were not for some imperfect flaws that start popping up quickly, spoiling many of the positive impressions one had made.

Is Pro Basketball Manager 2017 better than the 2016 edition? We reviewed it to find out

Bug, bug e ancora bug

The big problem with Pro Basketball Manager 2017 is the performance: which seems incredible given that it is a game made up mostly of texts and tables. Yet not only is the initial upload a pain, but even the navigation between the menus is plagued by a noticeable delay between the inputs and the appearance of the much desired screen recalled.

At the third edition of the game, something more was expected from Umix Studios also from this point of view. Remember that no one will ever ask a managerial to be what he cannot and must not; therefore to offer who knows what graphic delicacies or triple A finishes. The minimum wage, however, is right to expect it, that is, avoid harmful expectations due to disproportionate loading times and, above all, try to create a title that is as stable as possible. There, the second big problem of Pro Basketball Manager 2017 is the presence of many, too many bugs. Here too we want to be clear: we are not talking about small glitches, which in such a title can also be there, but blocking bugs, which in some cases have forced us to restart Steam to return to play and which occur at random moments. The Umix Studios series has always been very lacking from this point of view and, to be honest, the 2017 edition is not the worst (2015 was a nightmare).

But it is also the third and compared to the previous chapter it is much worse, probably because of the new 3D engine, the only real news of relevance from a technical point of view. The rest has remained more or less the same, a sign that much of the code has been recycled. Honestly, we can not complain too much even about this, because that of the managerial it is a genre that enjoys a lot of annual iterations: provided, however, that decisive steps are taken forward. Steps Pro Basketball Manager 2017 Does Not Take. A few examples are enough to make us understand: the buggy editor was and buggy remained and in some circumstances it was really frustrating to use; the game has memory problems that cause it to crash after about two hours and the 3D engine, while doing little relevant, often crashes the game. Before writing we did an online research to understand if these problems happened only to us, or if they are widespread. Unfortunately they are frequent and therefore we feel obliged to warn you, penalizing the final judgment. It must be said that the developers are updating the title with good regularity, but it must also be added that the sales have not gone very well and that, therefore, they may soon abandon it.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Intel Core i7-4770 processor
16 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 video card
Windows 10 operating system

Minimum requirements

Windows 7/8/10 operating system
Dual Core 2,5GHz processor
3 GB of RAM
768Mb video card compatible with DirectX 10 and Shaders 4.0 Ati Radeon HD 5670 / Nvidia GefForce GTX 260 or higher

Comment

Digital Delivery Steam Price 19,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

5.5

Readers (1)

6.0

Your vote

Pro Basketball Manager 2017 on the one hand is the most complete title of its kind (also because the competition is scarce), with the possibility of managing many teams of 2016/2017 championships from all over the world, for seventy competitions and twenty thousand players; on the other hand, however, it is a risky product due to the numerous bugs that it carries with it from edition to edition, some of which can compromise the gaming experience. Sure, you might be among the lucky ones who don't suffer too much from it, but the risk is there. For the rest it is a managerial with many options, despite treating some aspects with a certain superficiality, and potentially able to remain on your hard disk for the whole year, that is until the arrival of the 2018 edition ... always that it is a 2018 edition.