NBA 2K27 - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
To say I love my basketball would be fair, if perhaps understated. I love Hali and my Indiana Pacers; my entire extended family (except for my weird brother-in-law, who supports Sydney) is deeply committed to the Illawarra Hawks in the NBL, and I played the sport myself for many years until old age won and my knees lost. As a result, I have a long history with NBA 2K. A very long history. 2K10 was my first time, 2K12 I got serious. From then on, it has been every single year.
But this year, something was different; something has changed to make me perhaps reconsider my annual dip into the world of the NBA. I am not comfortable, I am not satisfied, and I am certainly not happy. All the excuses I’ve made over the problems inherent in the 2K franchise seem especially weak this year. So I thought I would dive into those irritations, excuses and, yes, the bits that are still great. Welcome to the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of NBA 2K27
The Good
Well, it’s the basketball, obviously. No matter what it does wrong, the game of basketball is always represented pretty darn well in these games and this year is no different. It is a little tougher, thanks to shot timing requirements being tweaked, but overall the gameplay is smooth and a beautiful recreation of the sport I love. The feel of nailing a 3 to the fist-pumping exhilaration of getting an “and 1” opportunity are, as always, a delight and if you just want to play ball with mates, well you are pretty well covered.
There have also been a couple of great new ideas implemented. There is a new buddy system in the career mode that allows you to help improve a teammate (who you also get to customise) and really develop a 2-man game. It is a cool new feature and one that adds a bit more to the story mode than I thought it would. The story mode also does a much better job of teaching players some of the more advanced mechanics, something they haven’t really done before. It shows players how to call plays, set screens and use your teammates more efficiently, which will only improve your skills as you progress.
Finally, and I feel weird saying this, but DLSS 5 is actually a cool thing here. In a game where lifelike realism is the graphical goal, DLSS 5 is a smart thing to implement. In fact, the game looks great on PC and runs smoothly. At launch, there were a few framerate hiccups on my laptop (5060 laptop card), but that has since disappeared thanks to a couple of patches. On my main gaming rig, it absolutely sings.
The Bad
Now we are starting to get into the stuff that is really rubbing me the wrong way. Firstly, let’s talk about the career mode. For the longest time, this mode has been my main mode within the game. Complete the (always) cheesy story, take my player to the NBA, get drafted by the Pacers and help them to win their first championship. Classic stuff, really. But here it is an absolute grind of a mode. The writing is just bad, like Hallmark-movie-of-the-week bad. The story sees this year’s MP involved in a car crash after he wins his high school MVP, which forces him down the road of proving himself through the G League instead of getting a college scholarship. A simple, yet workable setup, but one that is ruined at every turn by teeth-achingly bad storytelling. The crux of the story works like this. MP gets into a team, douchebag gets dropped from the NBA into the G League, and a clash of egos ensues; MP gets traded to a new G League team; douchebag gets dropped from the NBA… etc etc. There are only a few minor tweaks to that each time around, and it is just mind-numbingly bad watching these “characters” play out a drama like they are on Days of Our Lives.
This career mode also includes goals that are frustrating and repetitive. Things like helping a teammate get a A rating or making sure a teammate scores a certain amount of points. They make sense, in that they are used to teach players how to implement gameplay mechanics, but they are more than annoying to achieve, mainly because you have to rely on the AI-controlled player to actually do what it is supposed to. I had to go through the motions 3 times at one point because the “Star” I was supposed to be helping to score couldn’t get the ball in the basket if it was as big as a truck. I could have lived with that had I only had to do this once, but with each of these teammate-focused goals, I had to do them multiple times as the story progressed, and it made me turn the game off more than once. Just let me play basketball, for god’s sake.
Following on from this, it is just too darn hard to get to the actual basketball. This is a basketball game, not a lifestyle simulator. I don’t care about sponsors, I don’t care about shops, I don’t care about hoverboards, and I don’t care about personalities. I care about the actual sport. I know NBA 2K has been heading this way for years, but in this entry it seems especially painful. Here’s an idea: a mode where you take your created player and just play some ball… crazy, I know.
The Ugly
When it comes to the ugly and NBA 2K it can only mean one thing. VC. Virtual Currency has been the anchor around the neck of all 2K sports titles for years now but in this edition it is especially egregious. They want you to spend your hard-earned everytime you turn around and it becomes toxic and chronically frustrating.
The best/worst example of this is the new Era Mode. This sounds like such a cool idea. Take a created character and jump into classic basketball teams like Jordan’s Bulls or Bird’s Celtics. I was actually really excited about this; that was until the fine print became apparent. You can’t use your career mode character; you have to create a new one for each era. That means all the time you spent (or money) on getting your career character up to an NBA level is worthless, and you have to do it all over again for each of the eras. That is truly a hundred-plus hours of grinding just to get your player to the point where they won’t be an embarrassment on the court… or you can spend real-world money to shortcut the grind. This is almost predatory and god it makes me want to scream to the skies.
This addiction to VC has been plastered everywhere through 2K27 and while in past years I have been able to ignore it, here it is impossible to dodge. It feels like you are only buying half the game at points and if you want the rest of it, you can grind it out or dip into your wallet. It, quite frankly, sucks and I just can’t support it.
In all, I can’t even score this game. I can’t argue that the basketball itself isn’t great because it really is; I love it. But everything else is problematic or downright predatory. I feel like only a massive dip in sales and a huge fan outcry at this point will stop 2K from heading further down this path, but I have been hoping that for years, and it still hasn’t come.
Is 2K27 the year we finally get a basketball rebellion? Oh God, I hope so; if only to see the game I once loved rise again.
