While the world isn’t exactly wanting for more examples, if you happen to need one more reminder that competition is a good thing, then you only have to look at what has happened with licensed sports video games in the last twenty years. It used to be that every major professional sport had at least a few video game franchises battling it out for the fans’ attention, but these days most leagues have locked in with one partner. The value of having a league license is massive in sports games, especially ones that aim for a more realistic feel. Between that lack of competition, the rise of microtransactions, and the annualized nature of the genre, it’s hard to get too excited about any given licensed sports release.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the NBA 2K27 review! I’m not going to say the NBA 2K series is the worst offender of all of those things I just briefly mentioned, but it certainly comes up in the conversation. After EA’s NBA Live series went to its apparent final rest after NBA Live 19, the NBA 2K series has had the whole court to itself. Like many sports franchises, it has struggled to make meaningful improvements while sticking to its yearly release schedule. The whole enterprise has been absolutely infested with microtransactions, and it has an obvious effect on the game’s design. There’s only so much time the team can dedicate to fixing bugs or balancing issues in any given release before getting going on the next edition. All of this would be a serious problem if it wasn’t the only NBA game in town, but it is.
Over here in Nintendo Switch 2 Town, we have an extra twist to deal with. When the new console arrived last year, basketball fans who primarily play on Nintendo machines were likely hopeful the upgrade in power would bring a version of NBA 2K much closer to its peers on other platforms. Unfortunately, the Switch 2 version of NBA 2K26 didn’t live up to those hopes. While it finally managed parity in terms of features and modes with other versions and certainly stepped things up in presentation from the Nintendo Switch iterations, the overall graphical performance wasn’t quite up to snuff. A relatively steady 30 frames per second is easy enough to live with, but between lengthy load times, minimal improvements in resolution, and missing visual details, NBA 2K26 on Switch 2 was more of an underachiever than an all-star.
On top of that, online play was a disaster. Most of the time, when I tried to play, I ran into a lot of issues like dropped games or lag. Without cross-platform play, even when I could get a good connection going, it was a real ghost town. Shame, as in many ways, NBA 2K26 was a great entry. The MyCareer mode was really cool, and told a rather engaging story as these things go. On the court, the gameplay was the best it’s been in a long time. Sure, there was no escaping the “grind or buy” aspect of the series, but if it’s fun to play, a grind can be surprisingly bearable. It was a subpar version of a good basketball game, but that sometimes happens with the first entry on a new platform.
NBA 2K27 shows a fair number of improvements across the board. The biggest one is that you can enjoy a fairly stable 60 frames per second if you opt to play in performance mode, and it’s a real gamechanger. You’re sacrificing a lot of graphical effects and details by opting for this setting, but it’s an easy choice. The resolution is 1080p in both docked and handheld modes, with the latter making use of DLSS. No, it doesn’t look as good as the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series versions of the game, but I don’t think anyone was expecting that. What we have here is what I feel was expected of last year’s edition on Switch 2, and I’m happy we got there this time around. Still some nasty loading times, but that’s the nature of the beast.
Sadly, I don’t think the game itself is as good this time around. I didn’t enjoy the MyCareer story nearly as much this time, and the Eras part of it only made the grind worse. You have to roll a new version of your character for each of these modes within a mode, and that character will then need to be leveled up independently either through your hard work or your plump wallet. This would have been so much better if I could just bring my already powered-up character around as I liked. I know the balancing would have been a mess, but starting over six times is a whole different kind of mess. This is where the existence of that Virtual Currency starts eating at my thoughts, because a big part of me thinks it’s only set up this way to sell more of that stuff.
The online aspect continues to pose a problem for this Switch 2 line of NBA 2K as well. The MyCareer and MyTeam modes are where you’re likely to want to spend most of your time with NBA 2K27, and since they are hooked directly into that Virtual Currency economy, they require you to be online to play. This presents an issue for people taking their Switch 2 on the go, but this is a problem the Switch versions of NBA 2K have always wrestled with. The bigger issue is that once again, the online experience is just not great here. Specifically, it’s hard to get a good connection and even harder to find anyone to play with since the Switch 2 online community is isolated from other platforms. I’m sure at some point the player base on Switch 2 will be populated enough to feed the online stuff properly, but we’re definitely not there yet.
This undermines so much of NBA 2K27, and it ends up making the already hard-to-ignore microtransaction aspect of the game even more difficult to take in stride. That’s regrettable, because the actual gameplay once you’re on the virtual court is really excellent in this year’s version. That’s the one part of the NBA 2K series I generally have trouble arguing with, and between the gameplay improvements (defense has gotten some much-needed love) and the higher framerate Nintendo basketball fans haven’t eaten this well in a long time. It feels great to play, and while I can still see some room for improvement, I think this is as good as NBA 2K has ever been. It’s the things surrounding that gameplay that need more consideration, I’d say. Addressing them completely might go against the goal of selling virtual buckeroos, though.
NBA 2K27 is a step forward and a step back for the Nintendo Switch 2 incarnation of this series, with the biggest problems persisting from last year’s take. In terms of how it runs, the new 60 frames per second performance mode is a real boon, and the overall look of the game is much better than NBA 2K26 was on Switch 2. The on-court action is very well done, but the structure surrounding it has some issues that I can’t help but suspect exist due to the game’s desire to sell Virtual Currency. The heavy emphasis on online makes the game kind of a pain to deal with for handheld players, and with no cross-platform play, the Switch 2 version finds itself at a real disadvantage in terms of player population. Well, maybe next year.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by 2K Games
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