NBA 2K26

Written by Jason Dailey on 9/10/2025 for PS5  

This is my third straight year reviewing 2K’s annual NBA release, though I’ve been playing the series for more than 15 years now. I must admit that it can be tough reviewing sports games year-after-year, because unless we’re changing console generations, the new game each year is typically iterative, rather than innovative.

Having said that, personally, I’ve grown a little tired of sports game reviews that simply lambast these annual releases as “copy and paste.” With development teams getting 12 months to turn around next year’s game, they can’t possibly build a new game from scratch each year. If you want to argue that we don’t need a new game ever year, that’s a different conversation, and an argument I could get behind. All of which is to say that I try in earnest to look at how annual games are working on their craft with each release. How they’re building for the future of the franchise, if you will.

Overall, NBA 2K26 doesn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken with 2K25, while still making some under-the-hood and quality-of-life changes that feel like the franchise is building for that future I was talking about. It’s not a renovation. It’s not a remodel. It’s a refinement. And I think that’s okay.

I will tell you right from the tip: there is a metric crap ton of content in NBA 2K26. As I’ve said in the past, it’s a lifestyle game, and that’s totally cool if you have the time for it. As a semi-professional game critic (who plays real life on Hall of Fame difficulty), I don’t get to devote as much time to each game as I’d like after a review period. 2K26 is still made for someone like me—someone that will maybe get to play an hour or two here and there after this review—but this franchise gives me FOMO nowadays. I want to do it all. I want to have a 30-year franchise with my Utah Jazz in MyGM, I want to chill and play REC and PARK games in The City, and I want to build my card collection in MyTEAM. There’s just not enough time in the day.

So, when reviewing a new NBA 2K game, I’ve developed a tried-and-true plan of attack. I always start in MyTEAM, which is usually my favorite of all the modes, though The City and MyCareer has something to say about that this year, but more on that later. MyTEAM is mostly the same as last year from a structural standpoint, though it does feature one big addition: the WNBA. For the first time, you can collect WNBA player cards for both current and former players. The cool part is that you can have a blended team of both NBA and WNBA stars, across all game modes within MyTEAM. In fact, my best card so far is a 94 overall Diamond-caliber (the card pack gods smiled upon me) DeWanna Bonner and she balls.

There are still tons of challenges and modes to put your card collection up against, with new challenges added every day and every week. From a game mode standpoint, the usual suspects are back, including Domination (both NBA and WNBA now), Triple Threat, Clutch Time, King of the Court, Showdown, Breakout, and a couple of new modes as well.

First is Breakout: Gauntlet, a roguelike-style mode where you take your entire card collection into a series of games that scale up from very easy difficulty the further you progress. The catch is that you can only play with each card once, so it adds some strategy of deciding when to use your best players, or when to burn those mighty Free Agent cards. You earn prizes and MyTEAM Points along the way, with the rewards scaling alongside the difficulty. Breakout: Gauntlet is a great addition to MyTEAM that feels a little more casual than Domination and some of the other modes but will still put your skills to the test as you climb the ladder.

My favorite MyTEAM mode last year was Triple Threat Park, and that hasn’t changed with 2K26. I could spend hours teaming up with randoms for some 3v3 games with my favorite card, which right now is a 90 overall Amythest Donyell Marshall—a former Jazz man. The NBA team, not the music genre. I like the pick-up style game modes, probably because they fit my gaming schedule the best, and 2K expanded the options here quite a bit this year. There are two new game types, including the ability to play 2v2 in halfcourt games, if that’s more your style, as well as All-Star Team-Up, a 5v5 cooperative mode where each player brings their favorite card to play with and against nine other players and their favorite cards.

I’ve probably said too much about MyTEAM, but before I move on, I want to mention that I’m not a fan of the new player card view, which has abandoned the back-of-the-card view where stats, badges, and tendencies used to be listed for a more traditional menu with tabs. While the new look offers a little deeper dive into your cards, I found it to be not as user friendly, and certainly not as easy on the eyes. Maybe it will grow on me over time.

I teased that MyCAREER and The City may have dethroned MyTEAM as my go-to mode this year, and that’s a hard thing to do. But The City is so good this year, and there is so much to do that you could play it and nothing else in NBA 2K26, as many players do. 2K has streamlined The City by no small margin, making the mammoth mode exponentially more digestible, and finally running at a solid 60 frames per second. They’ve ditched a sprawling map for a smaller strip mall-style layout. I no longer feel the need to fast travel between activities or pull out my skateboard to zoom to get where I’m going in a respectable amount of time, though that is still fun to do. Why was I ever fast-traveling in a basketball game in the first place?

The City has essentially become a basketball MMORPG, and I cannot get enough of it. My favorite activities are playing pick-up games at The Park or The REC with my custom MyPLAYER, even though the companion app still can’t give me a decent scan of my real face to import. At The Park, you can peruse a set of outdoor courts and call next for 3v3 or 2v2 games with and against other folks. Your enjoyment is somewhat dependent on how sweaty your teammates are, in addition to whether they’re a ball hog, but that’s par for the course. Online performance feels improved even from last year, though I’m still suffering from input lag when shooting. At this point, I’ve accepted that it’s probably just a me problem despite having a one gig fiber connection. Though I still question how online twitch shooters can get it right, but NBA 2K can’t all the way.

There is so much to do in The City, with The REC and The Park being just two of several modes. There is also The Theater, where you can play a variety of 2v2 and 3v3 games without the wait of The Park, Proving Grounds and The Ante for high-stakes competitive play, and Street Kings, where you can take on the CPU alone or in co-op in 3v3 streetball games. As I mentioned, I prefer the more casual settings of The Park and The REC, but you can get as sweaty as you want in The City, even by taking on the server MVP, or players on long winning streaks in The Park, which awards big bonuses if you’re able to knock them off.

New to The City this year are Crews, which are essentially NBA 2K’s versions of clans. You can create your own or join up with a group of up to 50 other players. As a group, you can actively team-up to compete in modes or just passively earn rewards for hitting collective milestones, like getting X number of assists in The Park games. It’s a nice and easy way to earn some passive Virtual Currency (VC) which can be used for upgrading your MyPLAYER. You can’t start earning rewards from a Crew until you have chipped in towards completing milestones, and not until you’ve been in the Crew for seven days. Here’s the problem: despite contributing to at least three Crews so far, I keep getting kicked from them, I’m assuming by the group’s founder. If I’m one of these people that just join-up hoping to reap the benefits with no sweat equity, I get it—kick me. But there needs to be some better guardrails protecting players from having to constantly restart that seven-day grace period before they can get access to the larger Crew rewards.

Okay, so here is the albatross around The City’s big neck: microtransactions. As in year’s past, your MyPLAYER begins at a lowly 60 overall rating, which I don’t have an issue with, but to progress in a meaningful and timely manner is going to require you to focus solely on this game mode to grind, or spend some cold hard cash. To be clear, you don’t have to spend a dime on microtransactions if you don’t want to; you earn VC just by playing the game. But I don’t know that you’ll have any fun taking your 60-something rated player online to play against cash whales and sweats in a week or two who have reached the 80s and 90s. To illustrate my point, 2K was kind enough to send over the Superstar Edition of NBA 2K26, which included 100,000 VC to spend however I see fit. I spent around 60,000 of that VC to upgrade my guy from a 60 to a 73 overall player rating. 75,000 VC costs $19.99 in real dollars on every gaming storefront. That’s on top of the $60-plus you’ve already spent on the game. If you are the type of player that only plays NBA 2K each year, or at least very few other games, you’re probably fine—grind away. But for the rest of us, prepare to put some skin in the game, one way or the other.

The other half of MyCAREER is the single-player story mode called Out of Bounds (A Spike Lee joint) which features your MyPLAYER (MP) as an upcoming high school basketball star in the quaint Vermont town of Maplewood. Despite being the star player for the Maplewood Snowy Owls, MP is not getting the attention he is hoping for from college scouts. He decides that he needs to venture out to a bigger basketball market to try to land with a club league team that can help him find more notoriety. From there you participate in the biggest moments of MP’s career, filled with cameos from NBA stars that may even become your business partner, depending on the choices you make along the way. I don’t typically resonate with these stories in MyCAREER—I think because of my age—but Out of Bounds has been good so far. It’s not too corny and is a little more grounded than in the past.

Surprisingly, the last mode that I checked out this year is the MyGM mode, where I took the new curated GM storylines for a spin with my Utah Jazz. New for 2K26, each NBA team has an optional handcrafted storyline that picks up prior to this past offseason beginning. My team governor sat me down and instructed me to acquire Cooper Flagg—the real life #1 draft pick—no matter the cost, even if it meant trading away other big-name players. He also gave me a three-year deadline to reach the Western Conference Finals. No pressure. So, it was probably a bad idea to trade away five first-round picks to get Cooper Flagg then, right?

How dare you doubt me. You see, I followed the Jazz’s actual offseason playbook by trading away veteran players Jordan Clarkson and Colin Sexton and recouped three first-round picks in the process. All in a day’s work as General Manager. I enjoyed the strategy of trying to emulate what my Utah Jazz were (sort of) doing thanks to the new storylines. Especially since it gave me an opportunity to test out the trade logic, which feels improved from year’s past.

Playing in MyGM with real teams and players is also where the new gameplay improvements can be felt the most. 2K26 has received a new motion engine, backed by machine learning and their ProPLAY tech, which 2K says is the biggest change to player movement since 2K21. My memory is fuzzy on 2K21, but I can tell you that without a doubt, NBA 2K’s gameplay has never felt better. The best way I can describe it is with one word: fluid.

Movement feels far more fluid than in previous games, which leads to gameplay flowing more naturally as well. I finally don’t feel like I’m being sucked into animations on both ends of the court, and the result is that it looks more like a real NBA game. Even the most physical games in real life have a smoothness to the flow of gameplay that we hadn’t really seen before in 2K. The biggest change with the motion engine is with lower body physics, which keeps players from feeling stuck to the floor, or on ice skates at other times. These improvements have done wonders for the gameplay, which has reached a peak for the series.

Ultimately, NBA 2K26 is not wildly different from last year’s game from a structural standpoint, but it does feel markedly better to play than 2K25. Improvements to the player motion engine are best felt when using current NBA teams and players due to the ProPLAY technology, but no matter which mode you gravitate towards, the gameplay has never felt better.

The City surprised me this year with some much needed quality-of-life improvements that finally allowed the mode to click for me, and now it’s all I want to play. Still, you know the drill by now with microtransactions in 2K, and you’ve probably figured out if you are a no-money-spent player, a buy-some-VC-here-and-there player, or a shut-up-and-take-my-money player. But overall, NBA 2K has been working on their game, slowly but surely, perfecting their craft and building for the future of the franchise.