We don’t really like rap music, or at least this journalist doesn’t. Much. Rap’s really only a steppingstone for ignorant teens in their journey to discovering metal. What’s more, we don’t really like American sports (some of us do – ed): basketball, football, ice hockey, televangelism and so on. It would stand to reason then, that a basketball game featuring a soundtrack of undiluted (c)rap music and hosted in high-definition video by hip-hop producers Chuck D and Just Blaze, would be so far down the X360 food chain as to risk being savaged by an amoeba. So it was with trepidation, four sighs, and a bucket of purest ‘meh’, that we picked up our review copy of NBA Ballers: Chosen One and kicked it lovingly into the nearest disc tray.

It’s nice to be nicely surprised. Especially when the nice surprise comes from somewhere surprising. Looking at Chosen One, it actually didn’t take us long to realise why we generally despise basketball games so much. Most suffer from two major problems. Firstly, that we don’t really understand the deep complexities of the game, and secondly, that it always seems to us that moving the stick upward always results in a foul. Move it down? Foul. Left? Foul. Press B? Foul. Do nothing? Foul! Of course, the second problem is a result of the first, but nevertheless we don’t relish having to spend four years in b-ball school just to understand a bloody videogame. With rap music in it. But where those games fail, Chosen One excels.

Sticking to one-on-one and its variations, the career mode unusually follows one player and like the hugely enjoyable challenge modes of games like Tiger Woods, it presents you with a very simple task – beat each successive challenge to advance your way to being champ. Furthermore, the game actually has a plot of sorts, a story of your baller’s rise to fame. Fouling is nigh-on impossible, even wrestling with your opponent seeing nary a whistle blown. Multiplayer interestingly allows up to four players (two-on-two) or even three players (one-on-one-on-one) on a single 360, or across the electric interweb.

The first question on our lips when beginning any sports title that incorporates a customisable avatar is, naturally, ‘how ridiculous can we make him look?’ We were able to give him neither antennae, nor a pair of ladies breasts, but short of that, we were pretty satisfied with what we could come up with – as these screens attest to. Your character also has a set of RPG-style stats, which fill as you progress through the game’s story. But annoyingly, even though you’re given a large quantity of points to allocate from the start, subsequent points earned are auto-allocated into areas where your style of play naturally correlates. It’s a decent enough system and does seem remarkably adaptive, but we’d rather put our points into whatever we please if that’s all the same to you.

Each player involved in a particular game will have a separate HUD fixed to the bottom of the screen. This shows the player’s current score, the number of rounds won and the progress of their super moves. These rather obviously titled style-outbursts do pretty much exactly what they say on the tin. And man are they annoying. Bearing in mind that scoring against some of the NBA’s more nimble proponents is testing at the best of times, with matches becoming desperately close as you battle to be first to reach the desired score line. Imagine then, being a point ahead, having played this opponent 14 times already and lost, when out of nowhere, he stuns you in the face with the ball, climbs onto your back and pulls a breakdance windmill, kicking the ball into the net for the winning three-pointer. Fair enough, you can do this stuff too, but its cutscene format is just too detracting from the flow of the game. And annoying. Really, really annoying.

That said, we haven’t got another bad word to say about Chosen One because despite some irritating and perhaps ill-advised design decisions (certainly for us tea and crumpet types, anyhow) the game is pretty damn addictive. The opponent that took us 14 attempts to beat? Not a lot of sports titles would keep us coming back after that quantity of punishment. NBA Ballers: Chosen One bears the classic mark of a good videogame, the fact that you’re always willing to accept that you could have done better and very rarely feeling that you’ve been unfairly diddled. Except when someone windmills on your head. Yeah. Except then.

Dan Howdle