If you’ve ever dreamed of managing a pro basketball team, the developers at Umix Studios have made this a reality. I quickly found out that I’m not the managing type, but you might be. Pro Basketball Manager 2024 has loads of potential, and I’ll be keen to see where it goes in the future.

The first thing you need to do is create your manager, and while there aren’t many options when it comes to customising them, this doesn’t matter too much – it’s just a still image. You can, however, adjust characteristics. After selecting a pre-made profile, you can use simple sliders to move around and spend points on several options, such as offensive and defensive tactics, loyalty, player management, and ambition.

Once you have moved on from creating your character, you move into the leagues, where you select from different countries and the leagues within them. For argument’s sake, we will choose the United States of America, falling under the American League. This then breaks down into teams, but not those found in the NBA, so don’t expect to see the Los Angeles Lakers. Finally, we get into the biggest aspect of this title – managing the team and its players.

The menu is broken down into categories of players, tactics, training, schedule, finances, facilities, staff, and the recruitment centre. There are some familiar names, but they have been adjusted due to copyright and licensing. If you are a fan of the NBA, you’ll quickly put two-and-two together. The main objective is to put your manager’s pants on and make sure your players are happy and healthy, making sure you have a strong side to beat the opposition in the games.

I would love to see some more immersive updates in the future, like making sure the team can make it to games by booking flights, accommodation, and transport. It might make it feel like you’re doing a bit more than just clicking the mouse button, but that is all you’re doing. As it is, you’re just making sure things are running while watching the money move within the team’s account with no real explanation as to why.

The sound was super basic in this title. Background music, being mostly acoustic guitar, sounded more like something you would hear while sitting next to a campfire, kind of breaking the feeling of being at an exciting basketball game, and the simulated games didn’t help much either. Aside from hearing a small cheer or the ball hitting the hoop, there really wasn’t much to it, and it didn’t excite me to play.

You spend a lot of time looking at a very basic UI that looks like it was created in MS Paint, and I would have preferred to see some more detail put into something you stare at so much. When you’re watching the simulation gameplay, the court graphics are very cartoony in appearance and feature very simple animations. Again, I feel like these could have used some more work as I found it difficult to play because of this.

As a management simulator, Pro Basketball Manager 2024 gets the job done. There are things that I would certainly change if I could, such as making the UI more detailed and interesting or adding some exciting music to make the simulated games more immersive, but all and all, if you love management simulators, you will be more than happy to spend some time smashing into this game.

Written by: Hayden Nelson