NBA The Run review – streetball with brains, but always-online holds it back

NBA The Run, a 3v3 arcade basketball game from Play by Play Studios – a new team stacked with EA Sports veterans – launched June 9 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Everyone going in wants it to be the spiritual successor to NBA Street, and the spirit is genuinely there. The always-online structure, though, stops it short of greatness.

The game revolves around knockout tournaments in two flavors: Knockout Squads for team-based 3v3 play, and Knockout Solos where you control the full trio yourself. Each NBA star's kit feels authentic – Curry can drain a three from anywhere but gets blocked easily, while Wemby is the strongest player in the game as long as you keep him in the paint; push him out and he's stuck taking bad jumpers instead of easy dunks. What really separates The Run from other basketball games is its randomized rulesets. Every match starts with a randomly assigned rule – Triple Threat makes three-pointers worth three and everything else worth one, while Dunkfest flips the value to dunks. It creates genuine metagame decisions around player selection and keeps the one-more-game hook alive. Matchmaking is fast, rollback netcode runs smooth, and the whole thing is hosted by legendary DJ Bobbito Garcia, whose presence fits the streetball aesthetic perfectly.

The always-online commitment is also the game's biggest liability. There's no story mode, no create-a-player, and couch multiplayer is completely absent – a glaring omission for an arcade sports title. The roster covers 32-plus NBA stars and five fictional streetball legends to unlock, but the legends have no lore behind them and end up feeling like grind rewards rather than characters worth caring about. If you only want to ball online, The Run delivers. For everyone else, the gaps are hard to ignore.

Play by Play has been clear that it plans ongoing updates rather than annual releases, so there's room for these missing features to arrive post-launch. For now, NBA The Run is a well-crafted, love-fueled streetball game that's genuinely fun when it clicks – it just needs more than online tournaments to fulfill the promise of its DNA.