NBA 2K's top mode improves further this year.

NBA 2K has been the gold standard for sports games for years. It's the benchmark that franchises like Madden, FC, and even the widely adored MLB The Show try to match within the limits of their own sports. That's not to claim it nails everything, but Visual Concepts often appears to be in competition with itself. It sets trends rather than following them.

That has always been most evident in The City, the series' social PvPvE hub and the beating heart of its community. While other areas of this year's entry are less consistent, The City demonstrates that if you're only going to pick up one sports game this year, NBA 2K27 is the one to get.

The City is where players gather for basketball games at varying levels of intensity, purchase cosmetics, and take on live-service challenges--it's the center of NBA 2K27's universe. This hub is tightly woven into the single-player MyCareer mode, and together they deliver a more enjoyable and immersive tandem experience than most other sports games offer in their entirety.

This year, The City introduces several smart updates. Chief among them is the long-requested ability to import custom women characters into the mode. Visually, this is a welcome shift that lets the hub world better mirror real-life streetball communities--women have always been part of these spaces in real life, so they should be represented in NBA 2K as well.

However, this positive step comes with a frustrating limitation: MyCareer doesn't recognize them, effectively confining these women avatars to The City alone. On top of that, anyone who wants to play as a woman in The City must create a second, male avatar to access MyCareer's story mode. So while it's great to see, it also feels like an aggravating half-measure.

Finally bringing women avatars into The City creates a more diverse and vibrant social space.
New locations in The City, Casual Corner and Crew HQ, expand the virtual world into something far more welcoming and social. At Casual Corner, beginner-friendly pick-up games--including co-op PvE matches against fairly weak bots--are available whenever you want to queue up. Meanwhile, NBA 2K's clan-like "Crews" system gets a significant boost in Crew HQ, a dedicated space where you and your crew can meet, practice, play crew-only games, and hang out.

These two additions will help onboard new players, and by connecting to the Learn 2K suite introduced in recent years, they reflect the team's commitment to making the experience less overwhelming for newcomers. They also add two more varied ways to play in a hub world already packed with options, from the ultra-competitive Proving Grounds games that remove the shot meter to The Rec's full-length 5v5 matchups.

Then there's always The Park, where some players spend the entire year building their in-game legend and dominating a particular court as if they actually live in the neighborhood. Across multiple corners of the game's social world, these various modes feel substantial enough that you could commit to any one of them exclusively and still find plenty to enjoy.

My favorite of The City's modes, Street Kings, works like Mortal Kombat's Towers: PvE games against boss-type ballers that get harder with each match, with a hype man and an energetic crowd of NPCs cheering you on like a classic And 1 game. Since it debuted in the series two years ago, it's become my preferred way to play multiplayer in NBA 2K because it lets me and my brother make steady progress on The City's various progress bars, like player and season XP, without running into players who disrupt the more casual vibe we're after.

Of course, every year I feel compelled to call out the over-monetized elements of The City once again. Visual Concepts is extremely skilled at partnering with authentic-feeling brands that create aspirational cosmetics to buy and unlock in The City, and that's fine with me, even in its abundance. Personally, I loved getting to walk around in a Portland Fire jersey for the first time, as my home city recently rejoined the WNBA.

It's past time for returning players to keep their in-game cosmetics year to year.
But I will forever dislike that players can spend money to improve their players immediately. Paying to skip the grind that starts with players rated 60 overall (OVR) has long been an extra charge on players in the game's flagship mode.

It's also true that avatar intricacies like skill badges, takeover abilities, and cap breakers all mean that initial pay-to-win boost is less effective than it may sound. Paying to bring my 60 OVR player to 79 OVR as soon as he enters The City isn't as big a leap as grinding him to 99 OVR with multiple cap breakers and gold badges.

Still, it essentially means NBA 2K is not a $70 game, but closer to a $100 game for anyone planning to play online with friends. Attributes shouldn't be purchasable with the same universal currency that also buys me my Rose City hat and a pair of virtual Jordans. I'll say it every year, even as it seems this is very much a feature for parent company Take-Two, not a bug.

This year's game accidentally highlights a related issue, too. With The City taking on the same look (albeit with some added landmarks) as last year's, it serves as a more overt reminder that your purchases don't carry over, even if the virtual world's layout does. I really liked my avatar's Celtics hoodie last year, but seeing it in the shop again for a price, rather than just being available to me for free, felt especially irritating this year. The scenery is nearly identical, but the hoodie was apparently just a rental. There's so much for sale and new things are added frequently; it feels like it's time for NBA 2K to follow Fortnite's lead and just let me keep my in-game purchases forever.

The City is normally the social side of the custom avatar you'll build in the game, with MyCareer being the solo portion, but this year's game has built co-op into the MyCareer experience. However, it's a half-measure for now, and not as exciting as I once hoped when it was revealed. The narrative of MyCareer is much longer than usual this year, and the co-op portion of play only becomes available after several hours. At that point, the G League team you've landed with in the game's branching saga introduces a new teammate of yours in Trace Miller, a fake player invented for the story and meant to be the Player 2 of the story mode.

This leaves your co-op friend feeling like a sidekick. You can create your own avatar with your own intricately designed player build, even using your own face, but Miller is who he is, for the most part. Though you can choose his starting size and position, the build design tools are much simpler from there. The best version of co-op MyCareer would let both players fully customize their athletes, rather than leaving one feeling like merely the sidekick unlocked after many hours, as this first iteration does.

Building your custom player is a richly detailed experience that many in the community treat like a science.
The good thing is NBA 2K has long been great at taking an idea and building on it over time, rather than scrapping it if the first year or two don't satisfy players. It's a quality that has set this series apart from some other sports games, and I expect that North Star may affect this mode soon, hopefully for the better.

There's a third way to live out the life of your avatar this year: MyCareer Eras. Borrowing the same remarkably deep Eras feature from the team-based MyNBA mode, MyCareer Eras lets you drop your fake player into any decade from the 1980s Bird vs. Magic era onward, thereby time-traveling to the NBA of yesteryear. In any era, you'll see period-specific presentation elements, rules, uniforms, rosters, and even audience attire.

Eras were introduced in NBA 2K a few years ago, and they remain the coolest way to play Franchise-style. Though you could drop your avatar into MyNBA Eras last year, that was the extent of it. You were just a player on a team like any other. This year's version is a bespoke narrative experience that puts the spotlight on your player in a bygone era, full of challenges and emergent stories.

Taking my avatar to the early 1990s and seeking to paint over the Jordan dynasty is an incredibly fun thing to do, and just like The City--or MyNBA, which, admittedly, takes a backseat in terms of sweeping changes of its own this year--MyCareer Eras is a mode I could enjoy for hundreds of hours.

Though MyNBA doesn't get much of a look this year, it at least has received major overhauls in recent years. That's more than I can say for the game's suite of WNBA modes. Over the past three seasons and 2K sequels, my emotional investment in the WNBA has grown a lot, and with a local team making its grand reopening this year, I've been so excited to play as them in 2K. But having grown more attached to the league has led me to see some of 2K's shortcomings when it comes to the WNBA.

Even with several deep modes on offer, I hope the WNBA modes get more attention soon.
For one, The W, its solo avatar analog to MyCareer, doesn't allow you to import your woman avatar from The City, which, like the lack of a truly customizable Player 2 in MyCareer, feels like a half-measure. But in MyWNBA mode, where you take on seasons of a single team, there's a lack of the same care the men's league gets.

I'm sure the WNBA modes are played less, but I've always found it commendable how NBA 2K is a hub for all things basketball; only now I'm better able to see some of what's missing, like a robust halftime show and arena-specific ceremonies, the likes of which do exist in the real WNBA but only exist in the 2K version of the NBA.

I'm hopeful that, as the league continues to grow, 2K's WNBA modes can grow with it. It's great to see women in the game more, like in The City or in MyTeam, where they first arrived last year, but in their own bespoke game modes, some of the details this studio is otherwise so great at building into the experience are lacking.

I've spent a lot of words on not talking about gameplay, which might seem weird, but it's because this year's game feels the most year-over-year familiar to me of any game of recent memory. That's not exactly a bad thing. NBA 2K is a lot of fun on the court. It has been, so it is again. And it's not that the game adds nothing. In particular, I really like the new step-through finishing moves, used to finish a shot after you've lost your dribble. Like other aspects of on-court animations, lots of these are modeled after real players' go-to moves.

Visual Concepts has been using ProPlay, its in-house tech that transposes real NBA footage into gameplay animations, in ways that are hard to specifically attribute from outside the confines of the studio, but if ProPlay is why the game looks and feels so good, I'll take it. Combined with the game's continuing efforts to teach newcomers how to play 2K, as well as changes in The City, it feels like the series has never been more approachable.

While playing online can bring out any number of cheesy players who seek to break the game in their favor, this is true of all sports games and is usually improved upon if you stick to specific modes, like Rec games, where the crowded court of 5v5 gameplay minimizes any cheesehead's worst intentions. In games against the computer, I continue to be amazed by how different players and teams--even those spanning different eras--have their own playstyles.

Playing the Celtics, you'll get a heavy dose of Mazzulla Ball, while the Spurs rightly center everything around the unique size and talents of Wemby. This is a fun basketball game not just because of the depth and breadth of its modes, but also because its fo

Source: GameSpot