NBA 2K27 review: the richest sim yet, maybe a little too sure of itself, says IGN France

Buy NBA 2K27 if you're looking for the most complete basketball simulation on the market and you're willing to overlook a few missed opportunities on the content side. Skip it if you were hoping for a real revolution: it's an excellent technical vintage, but one that mostly manages its huge existing stock rather than renewing it.

For newcomers: NBA 2K has been THE basketball franchise for two decades, with its narrative career mode MyCAREER, its franchise management mode MyNBA, its card collecting mode MyTEAM, its online social hub The City, and now its female counterpart The W. This year, the arrival of DLSS 5 on PC clearly changes the visual game.

What works according to IGN France

The graphics, precisely, are stunning. DLSS 5 doesn't just smooth out a face: it homogenizes the entire scene, crowd included, benches included, and finally brings the series closer to the photorealism it has been aiming for over the years. It's probably the first game that gives real meaning to the term "next-gen" with this tech.

MyNBA remains the absolute strong point of the package. Franchise management is remarkably deep, with this year's player trust system that seriously beefs up negotiations: recruitment promises, contract guarantees, performance bonuses. It's pure GM role-play, though the journalist admits he regrets not being able to negotiate guaranteed playing time.

Controller in hand, the gameplay remains what it has always been: deep, demanding, capable of delivering credible basketball if you play as a team and respect player profiles. Height matters, offensive systems matter, mismatches matter. It's still the most accomplished sim in the genre, well ahead of anything else the sports competition offers.

What doesn't work

The problem is that several "new features" reek of blatant recycling. MyCAREER Eras literally merges MyCAREER and MyNBA Eras without its own staging, and also stumbles over annoying license gaps for a mode supposed to celebrate the league's history. The Fire and Concrete prelude, meanwhile, drags on for about a dozen hours even though its content (high school, G-League) is clearly the least interesting in the game, still according to IGN.

Another issue, more structural this time: Signature Shots let any player pull off combos worthy of a Curry, breaking simulation coherence as soon as you play competitively. And local co-op, purely and simply absent, remains incomprehensible for a sports game in 2026.

In the end, NBA 2K27 remains the undisputed reference in basketball sims, carried by a technical lead and content that no one else has - but its creative ambition falters against its own accumulation of systems.