The W is NBA 2K21 MT sports video gaming's first single-player career mode for a women's club sport. It is not a tokenized experience, nor a reskin of things NBA 2K21 does for the men's game. But it's a glaringly few-to-no-frills encounter, and also the lack of investment that I have in my player's development defeats the purpose of a single-player career. Therefore, I can't really warm up into the mode or urge others devote much time trying it. Aside from picking one of 10 player archetypes -- whose feature minimums and maximums are all locked -- the only influence I have in my own player's development is playing nicely (or not) in a league match. Whatever XP ("MyPoints" in this case) comes from this, the game applies automatically in a really opaque procedure.

Developing my player's off-the-court character is a similarly stiff and lifeless progression. Developer diaries before NBA 2K21's launch suggested that The W players would take on roles that real-life WNBA stars pursue, while promoting the league itself, carrying on negative gigs in media or fashion style, or preparing for a career as a coach. Well, all this is handled in a process whose only player interaction is choosing one of three options off a card between matches. Again, development is repaired, and all it delivers is unlockable makeup items on a fixed schedule. This indicates is that you become a very restricted core gameplay very quickly, and one which is extremely reminiscent of career manners I saw about the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It is tough to call The W a good first shot career-mode parity when a lot of its enjoyability comes out of, well, only playing with the games themselves. At least that action is distinguishable from the rest of NBA 2K21 whilst still being fun -- but it had been when I was messing about with the WNBA at MyLeague this past year, too.

Likewise, it's tough to criticize Visual Concepts' design here like pitching female avatars to the much bigger world of MyCareer would be the simplest or simplest solution. The WNBA deserves to have its own livelihood ecosystem; it is a more inviting statement to give the WNBA its own mode, rather than just dump them into NBA 2K21's aggressively competitive multiplayer Buy MT 2K21 globe and tell them to fend for themselves or, even worse, patronize them with inflated feature evaluations.