Double dribble through MyCareer while 2K takes a double-dip in your wallet
What can I say about NBA 2K27 that hasn’t already been said. Seriously. What can I say? I’m starting to feel like a broken record when it comes to this series after several years of the same basic bullet points. The game feels great on the court. Theres a million new modes but most players will only play one. A host of “revolutionary” gameplay improvements that most folks will never notice or use, but you can’t just put the game out there and say “It’s basketball. You know how it works. Orange ball goes in the hoop. Go have fun”. There’s a frustratingly overwhelming variety of trinkets and doodads and pretend trading cards (the bane of my sports-game playing existence) to spend all your hard-bought Virtual Currency on, assuming you don’t spend it all on maxing out multiple created players across the independent save files you’ll have to create to enjoy each of the modes that utilize the MyPlayer system this time around. It all starts to feel a bit like déjà vu. You guys aren’t coming here for a beat-by-beat breakdown of the feature list, and if you’re still reading this, I’ll assume you’ve played the series before, so let’s hit the high points, the low points, and the downright infuriating points so you can decide if this year’s version is worth investing both your virtual and actual currency in.
A high point right off the bat. This is still an incredible basketball game from the opening tip-off to the final buzzer. The gameplay really does feel great this year and it’s because of two major changes in my opinion. The first is the shooting controls. They’ve adjusted the shot system to ensure that the only way you’re going to make a basket is to have a green release. No more just early or just late balls bouncing in if you’re lucky. While this may seem a bit unrealistic, shots go in on less than perfect shots all the time, from a practical standpoint it makes it very clear from the second the ball leaves your hand if it’s going in or not. Couple this with the fact that green releases feel easier this time around than in any NBA 2K in recent memory, and you have a tight, predictable, and consistent shot function that behaves the way you expect it to almost every time. I say almost, because the game will still change the green section of the meter after you’ve pressed the shot button if a defender closes out or gets a hand in your face. This can be very frustrating if you think you have a perfect shot lined up until a defender comes charging in and disrupts your flow, but it’s a realistic part of the basketball experience and it’s tough to visualize how else they would accomplish the mechanics of a late play on the ball.
MSRP: $69.99
Platforms: XBOX (reviewed), PlayStation, Switch, PC
You’ll be grateful for this ability to challenge shots when you’re on the other end of the court, and the defense this year feels better than ever. Hands-up shot contests actually feel like they have an impact and steals, forced pick-ups, and tipped balls have a much more natural feel. These two items together make for an incredibly satisfying basketball experience, and I felt more in control than in years past. The on-court experience isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, for example AI controlled players are still terrible at picking up on impromptu screens by the player character unless they are explicitly called as a play and you do still get the occasional legacy clipping issue where the ball seems to pass through player models, but all in all this is the most solid roundball experience for the series to date.
There’s a host of game modes on offer here, but anyone who has read any of my NBA 2K reviews (or listened to the podcast) knows that the vast majority of my time is always spent in just one. MyCareer continues to be the star of the show in my opinion, with this year’s “Fire and Concrete” story mode being particularly engaging. 2K has heard my complaints about your star high school, top prospect, player launching into MyCareer as a 60 overall so they can rake you over the coals for VC and responded by…having your player suffer a debilitating back injury after a high school car accident that nearly leaves him paralyzed for life. What, you thought they were going to finally decouple MyCareer from MyPlayer and MyCity so they could do some actual non-microtransaction-based character progression? Come on.
My biggest issue with MyCareer this year is how this life-altering, career threatening experience is communicated in the story. Games have a huge benefit over movies in that they offer an opportunity for interactive and tactile storytelling and instead of utilizing that to offer the player a chance to struggle through physical therapy and fight to walk again, they swipe everything from taking the car keys to being back on your feet and ready to start playing pickup games again out of your hands and let it all play out in an anime style cutscene. A very strange choice and one that actively hurts the gravity of the story they’re trying to tell.
Once you get past the anime intro, however, you get dropped into a story with a lot more weight and realism than past iterations. No ghostly apparitions of dead friends here. Just a solid story about a talented kid trying to claw his way back up to the top of the draft board by showing out in the G-League. Along the way you’ll meet rival players with different experience levels and varying degrees of professional success all trying to accomplish the same goal, both as your teammate and at your expense (and those two aren’t mutually exclusive). Its locker-room politics at its finest and it works very well as motivation to climb the draft board and try to secure the top spot.
You’ll get some major help in the form of the other new addition to the mode, your Running Mate. For the first time in the series’ history, you’ll be able to play through the career mode with a friend who takes control of Trace Miller, your teammate and bestie throughout this journey. Don’t have a friend? First off, aww. Second off, it’s fine because even if you’re playing solo, you’ll have Trace along for the ride as a consistent computer-controlled teammate whose buildout and attributes you control. Even once your player makes it to the NBA, Trace comes along for the ride and will be on the court when you’re on the court. Is this realistic, no it isn’t, but it makes for a very enjoyable experience when you have a dependable and consistent teammate that you can build out to be a perfect complement to your playstyle. I love this addition to the game, and I think that it adds additional depth to the mode both on and off the court.
If you’re not all that interested in the story in “Fire and Concrete” but you still want to play through MyCareer (and possibly have a latent interest in time travel and/or are my age and have a nagging nostalgia for the 80’s and 90’s) you can also check out MyCareer Eras, which allows you to play through a created players career in one of 5 different historical eras in the NBA’s past. These player themed eras (Magic vs Bird, Jordan, Kobe, LeBron, and Steph) return from last year’s game and also make their presence felt in other modes as well. It’s a good addition, but considerably less interesting to me than “Fire and Concrete”.
All the other modes you expect from these games are here, and then some. MyNBA gets an expansion including a Legacy player-lock mode that allows you to pass down your selected players’ traits to the next generation like this was Rogue Legacy with more sweatbands. The W is back as the disappointing kid-sister to MyCareer and is once again a wasted opportunity. The WNBA is popular and we’re years overdue for a fully realized career mode with a story like we have on the men’s side. MyWNBA fares better and is much more feature complete with its NBA counterpart. You also get MyGM and all the sub-modes under MyNBA. Honestly, the game is bloated with modes at this point and many of them seem to accomplish the same or similar purposes. It feels like they have expanded the width of the game considerably over the last several years without as much commitment to depth and I don’t think it’s a positive. I’d much rather a deep, fully competent franchise mode that ticks all the boxes than a hodge-podge of different franchise-style modes that accomplish some but not all of it. MyGM in particular feels superfluous (and has the added challenge of stealing your GM’s name from your most recent created player, which has some hilarious unintended consequences).
Also, MyTeam is there. I’m sure there are new cards and stuff. I don’t really know. I know that the card stuff in these games is someone’s jam (although I confess, I’m not sure whose) but it’s definitely not mine. If you’ve read all the way through this review hoping I had something quantitative to say about MyTeam I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m sure there are plenty of other reviewers who have spilled a lot of ink about all the new ways it tries to separate you from your wallet in exchange for fake-opening fake-trading cards, so you have my permission to leave now and go read one of those. Back? Ready? Let’s continue.
Of course, the vast majority of playtime across all players in the NBA 2K series comes in The City. This mode is still, inexplicably, linked to MyCareer but thankfully the city itself is improved and there is very little back and forth required when playing through MP’s story. If you’re primarily a multiplayer fan there’s a bunch of new or redesigned stuff here including the ability to create a female MyPlayer and use them in The City for the first time. I’m also a big fan of Casual Corner, which pits new players up against either computer-controlled opponents or similarly experienced real players depending on your overall performance. It’s a really nice onboarding into the online experience.
I can’t talk about MyCareer, The City, The W, or even (shudder) MyTeam without addressing the elephant in the room though. Once again Virtual Currency absolutely dominates every aspect of this game. Despite the fact that this is a full-price game. Despite the fact that there are advertisements and brand logos splattered and splashed on just about every surface that will accept them. VC is a cancer that has spread through this series over the last decade and now has its tendrils in just about every aspect of the game. None more noticeable and egregious than in character progression for your MyPlayer. As mentioned, because The City and MyCareer are inexorably linked this means that even if you just want to level up your player character in the single player career mode, where it doesn’t matter to absolutely anyone else in the world if you’re a 99 overall who breaks Wilt’s scoring record every game, you’ll be spending VC to do it.
If you’ve read my NBA reviews before you know that I am vehemently opposed to VC being tied to character progression. It’s scummy, it trivializes the story in the career mode by ensuring your character always starts out as a scrub, and it creates a dollar fueled arms race for online play where you are basically required to shell out close to another $100 bucks if you want to match up with all the overall 99’s running around The City. That’s no exaggeration. As a matter of fact, I think this year’s game is actually a little bit tighter about the VC that you earn as well as being a little bit tighter about how much it costs to level up. Right off the jump, as soon as I was able in career mode, I went into the attribute screen to see what the most I could spend right off the top would be. It let me see what about 187,000 in VC would get me (even though I didn’t have that much) and it took me from a level 60 to a level 84. Considering the stats get more expensive as you increase in level, I’m betting it would take about 400,000 in VC to get to 99 overall. Considering the closest amount to that in the store is the 450,000 pack for $99.99, you get a sense of the economy at play here. Have other created MyPlayers to use in the other modes? Get ready to shell out additional VC for them. Want to buy card packs? VC. Want to unlock new animations? VC. It’s omnipresent and overwhelming at times.
If the game wanted to sell some cosmetic items for VC, that’s fine. Let people dress like Jake from State Farm if they want to. Tying it to everything that it’s connected to in these games feels like the absolute worst kind of mobile gacha experience but in a full priced package. I’m tired of complaining about the in-game virtual currency economy in this game every year but it’s a major detraction from what this game could and should be. There are some other UI and production problems here. Legacy issues with commentary saying things that don’t make sense in the context of where you’re at in the season (saying for example that MP has been “tearing it up off the bench all season” despite it being the first game) and some other weird things like excessive censoring of Mr. Brightside (why even have it on the soundtrack if you can’t say “touching his chest” or “takes off her dress” or “killing me”). These things pale in comparison to the glaring problems with the microtransactions though.
Once again, 2K has managed to produce a very competent on-court basketball experience that is nevertheless very difficult to give a full-throated recommendation to because of the bloat that they continue to spread through the mode selections and the corrupting tentacles of Virtual Currency staining everything they touch. If you don’t mind the grind and are willing to scoot along through MyCareer in the 70’s while you earn 800-1000 VC per game, you’ll find some joy here. If you buy these games to play online though, be prepared to come heavy with your wallet or don’t come at all.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.