NBA 2K27 - PlayStation 5 Review

NBA 2K27 by developer Visual Concepts and publisher 2K Games—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

It’s that time of the year again. Football’s getting started with hockey and basketball right around the corner. For a sports fan such as myself, it’s an exciting time, because there’s still optimism in the air before my teams can disappoint me. With these annual seasonal renewals of the sports season comes the related video games as well, and the question reviewers such as myself always face is this: Is this year’s game worth purchasing one year after the last one?

My answer? Yes, absolutely. NBA fans are going to almost certainly enjoy NBA 2K27.

I enjoyed last year’s iteration a great deal (scoring it an 8 / 10 in my review last year – you can read it here). I am the target audience here, as a lifelong fan of basketball (both playing it and playing video games of it). My hometown Pistons had a fantastic season last year (despite a rough if not surprising playoff run), further exciting me about this year’s game. I was excited to get this year’s roster of Cunningham, Thompson and Duren on the virtual court. I grew up in the big man era of tough defense and this team is built just the way I enjoy playing. 

The gameplay itself is excellent. You can add all the modes, bells and whistles and new features in the world, but if the game isn’t fun to play? You’ll put it down pretty quickly. Thankfully, I think most fans will agree that the overall gameplay is excellent. Now, I will say that last couple of years now, NBA 2K skewed a bit too heavily in favor of the offensive side of the ball. Having grown up on the Bad Boys and later loving the Goin’ to Work era of Pistons history, I appreciate that this season there’s a push to improve the defense.

This shift in philosophy shows up in a variety of ways. Some are quite obvious, as the way good defense (or just having a player with good defensive stats) near the shooter can quickly reduce the amount of ‘green’ space (what indicates if your timing was good enough for the shot to go in) you have to work with. There’s also a bit more timing needed on dunks and layups than in the past. I don’t see passes just getting picked off outright, but there’s a fair number of tipped balls if you decide to try to thread a pass through traffic with a subpar passer. There’s also subtle changes to defensive animations from years past, as jumping to block a shot or even just pressing up on the stick to get your hands up defensively produces a more realistic set of animations from your defender.

That’s not to say the offense has no chance here. You can still get buckets, especially if your defender is not playing angles well or has a player with inferior defensive stats. It helps that the offense isn’t completely neglected here. This series has been doing its best to try and make animations more fluid and versatile, and it shows. It might sound like a simple thing, but there’s layers to these improvements. Just as the jumping to block animations are more contextual, dribbling, passing and rolling off of picks feels less ‘canned’ than in years past. For those unfamiliar with what I mean, ‘canned animations’ were a way sports video games often created more realistic movements, but they often had to complete in ways that made collisions and interactions feel awkward, as they had to complete before you could do ‘the next thing’. NBA 2K27 isn’t perfect here, but it’s vastly improved over its predecessors and it makes the gameplay so much more visually and less frustrating.

Layered on top of this gameplay is the presentation, which is still excellent. Realistic sound effects, good color commentary and everything else that you’d expect from a sports game both visually and audibly is present. You still get the occasional odd face scan on players, but by and large the faces are excellent and as mentioned above, bodies are well animated. NBA 2K27 doesn’t have oodles of pads and helmets hiding the players’ physiques the way football and hockey do, making the graphics here that much more impressive. There are still a lot of reused audio commentary bits, and the odd occasional mistake that rears its head, but these are very much the exception and not the rule.

Now I want to talk about the modes and some of the changes from last year outside of the presentation, roster updates and the handful of gameplay changes. There’s the usual suspects such as quick play both online or against the computer, of course. First, we’ll talk about MyTeam – which is the hybrid fantasy basketball / card collection mode that is similar to Madden Ultimate Team and the like that tends to popularize sports games. For whatever reason, I’ve never really gotten into these modes much, though I’ve generally enjoyed NBA 2K’s more than the others. That’s still true, but something about it just isn’t clicking for me this year the way it has in the past. Maybe it’s the menu navigation, maybe it’s just how grindy it all feels or the constant reminder that if you want to spend more of your real world money, you can. VC (virtual currency) is – and likely will be forever – still a thing here. In some ways it's less egregious than in the past, so that’s good – but it still feels a bit greedy. However, people must be buying VC, because it’s so thoroughly baked into the game now. 

While MyTeam didn’t move the needle for me this year, MyGM is still a fun franchise running experience. There’s a handful of smaller tweaks to the system that make this hybrid simulation mode a lot of fun to run with. I made some mistakes early on with some of my player relationships as I was getting my feet wet with the mode, but overall? It’s enjoyable. The WNBA continues to get representation with it’s own mode, and it’s cool to see that you can have a female player in “The City” now (more on that below). It’s still lacking the same kind of fleshed out story that we see for the NBA players, but the progress is real and helps to represent the boon in popularity that the WNBA has seen in recent years.

The meat and potatoes of 2K every year for me (and probably most players) however, is MyCareer. The formula is still roughly the same as it has been for the last decade now, where you create a character and roll them through a combination narrative, PvE (your NBA career) and PVP (The City). You earn VC (there it is again) that you can then use to upgrade your player’s stats, or to buy gear or tattoos or other cosmetic items to help your player stand out from the crowd. 

This mode is still what sucks up far too much of my time every year. 

I tend to make at least two builds – one with a three point shooter who can handle and pass the ball well, and a big man who plays lockdown defense on the back of elite athleticism. Sometimes I make up one or two more characters just for the fun of it, but it’s hard to commit real time to more than two builds in my experience. This year’s NBA 2K27 wants you to try and make a lot of characters though, as there’s even a trophy for creating a player in each Era (more on *that* below). Of course, there’s that cynical side of me that thinks: more characters = need for more VC = more money being spent on the game. But, I will say that I felt like character progression was a bit faster than in years past and it wasn’t quite the grind to get to 99 as I recall it being in some previous seasons. 

There are two very cool new features in MyCareer that are worth calling out, as one has been asked for by the fans for a long time, and the other was one *I* have asked for in prior years’ reviews… kind of. The first is having a character tethered to yours in the primary MyCareer story mode. This is cool, because you can build your perfect complimentary piece to pair with your character. It adds even more to the existing (and addicting) formula of character progression. This running mate can also be played by another person if you want, and I have to say the idea of allowing co-op in your MyCareer mode is refreshing and pretty cool. I don’t really have someone to run this feature with these days (my son helped me poke at it, but he’s not a sports fan. Maybe he’s adopted?), but ten or fifteen years ago? Me and my buddy Randy would have been all over this back when we lived near one another and played 2K together a lot. 

The other new wrinkle is Eras. Now, Eras have been around for a few years now, with the idea that over the last few decades, the NBA can be broken up into various collections of years such as Bird vs Magic, or Jordan’s era or Steph Curry’s years at the top. There’s several here, and as someone who is fifty and lived through these various eras, it was fun to go back into the franchise modes, pick an era and manage a team in it. 

However, I believe it was in my review last year where I said it would be cool if you could start a MyCareer story in an older era, maybe have a related MyCareer spin out of that into a later or current timeline. Shades of a few years ago when there was a MyCareer that let you play a handful of games with your grandfather and father as part of the story mode, but with a lot more agency over the characters’ careers. Something like that would be pretty complicated, I’m sure, but hey – the roleplaying fan in me loves the idea of a generational storyline that can feed into multiple builds to use in The City. 

As for The City? I mentioned it earlier and it's essentially a connected hub. It's roughly the same size and layout as last year, which is to say a lot more compact (thankfully - I felt like I was wasting time traveling long distances in some of the prior years), and fairly easy to find what you need in short order. There's a ton of clothing shops, a tattoo parlor and more to help make your player as distinctive as you'd like - at a cost of VC of course. There's also a number of different modes that you can connect to other players through The City. This is the Player vs Player aspect, and where the most serious NBA 2K players congregate to try and best one another. It's basically Call of Duty with basketballs instead of bullets. This also brings out the worst in VC spending, as there's a definite "pay to win" vibe here. Sure, there's not much difference between an 87 and a 90 overall, but a 96 and a 76? Huge difference in what you can accomplish. I appreciate however, that more Player vs Environment (AI) options have been added as well, for people who have lower leveled characters or simply don't enjoy playing against people. It's treated as a sort of training ground to prepare you for the real thing of PvP, and it generally works. All of this is supplemented by various types of available matches (like at The Theater) and special events to help keep things fresh.

Well, we didn’t quite get all of that, but your MyCareer no longer has to be played in the ‘current’ timeline. Instead, you can choose to drop your player off in one of those other predetermined eras, complete with the rosters built to reflect real life – mostly. I add that caveat because there are some players who have refused to let their likenesses be used , which particularly sucks for me as a fan of the early 2000’s Pistons where some of the players aren’t on those rosters. But it’s like 95% accurate and still cool to drop someone into an era, create a player who feels like he could be the ‘missing piece’ to a championship caliber roster and play out my career as those years advance. Honestly? This is a ton of fun for me, and I get the feeling that if anything gets me to take a third or fourth MyCareer seriously? It’s going to be this feature right here. Give me my Bad Boys Pistons during the Bird vs Magic era. 

I’ve spent a lot of time playing NBA 2K27, and I know I’ll spend more.

There’s still some warts that need addressing, and I’ll do that now. The game advertises crossplay, but it’s half-baked. Yes, Xbox and PlayStation owners can crossplay with one another, but PC and Nintendo Switch 2 don’t get to join the virtual party. Also, the story in this year’s MyCareer was not my favorite. It wasn’t bad by any means, but I wasn’t nearly as engaged with the narrative as some of the years past. Also, there’s no real story to speak of from either the WNBA career mode or when you toss your player into a prior era in MyCareer. I get it – coming up with a half dozen bonus story lines would be a ton of work, but I still wanted to call it out. Last but not least? VC isn’t as ‘in your face’ as it has been in some prior years, but between the various battle pass / season events / opening packs of cards / progressing of players… it’s ever-present. 

For me, NBA 2K27 is pretty easy to recommend. If you’re a diehard NBA fan such as myself, yearly installments are something you look forward to and there’s enough improvements to make it worth while. If you’re a more casual fan of the sport or the series, and it’s been a few years since you last visited the series? Well, enough has changed by leaps and bounds to be worth a look as well.

Score: 8.25 / 10