With its polished immersion and wealth of activities, Just Hoops has staying power for basketball fans everywhere
Just Hoops on Quest 3 transports you right into a lively digital arcade complete with dozens of hoops challenges. Developed by Bitfellas, Just Hoops taps into nostalgia for batting cages and arcade shooters of old while utilizing modern VR to its fullest potential. The result is a really entertaining and immersive sports title.
From the moment you pick up your Quest controllers in Just Hoops, the attention to detail is evident. The motion controls make handling the ball feel impressively natural. Spending time practicing different throws in the tutorials proves highly worthwhile, as nailing shots requires proper wrist flick form down the line. Alternatively, you can also use your bare hands instead of the controllers, even though this mode is still considered as an Experimental feature. I myself used the controllers since this control scheme worked way better.
While the main thing you do is just play basketball, there's a large variety of, I don't know how to call them, "play modes" featuring different types of hoops from the traditional Pop-A-Shot to animated hoops like snakes, space invaders, dinosaurs, rotating hoops with closing lids and much more. These different play modes keep things fresh for a while and pose unique challenges.Like there's a cool play mode where you have to feed either fruits or meat to hungry dinosaur hoops... yeah, it sounds weird, but it's really cool.
Just Hoops offers a couple of cool environments like neon lit arcades or a spooky court. Alternatively, you can play in Mixed Reality and that works suprisingly well too. Even the hoops themselves come with some interesting designs or themes too like a Halloween inspired theme or even the Jurassic one.
While there's a multiplayer mode where you can compete against other players, during all my playsessions where I started to matchmake, I only managed to get into one match and even then, the other player lost their connection mid game. Maybe with more players getting this game, the whole multiplayer mode might become as much fun as I would imagine it would be, but for the time being keep in mind what I just said.
Just Hoops provides seemingly endless content that continues to engage through hundreds of shots thanks to varying challenges, leaderboards and unlockable cosmetics. Its pick-up-and-play style lends to both solo sessions and social experiences. With its polished immersion and wealth of activities, Just Hoops has staying power for basketball fans everywhere. I do recommend this game. Thanks for reading!
The game was reviewed on a Quest 3 using a review copy provided by the PR. Just Hoops - Arcade Basketball is out now on Meta Quest.
