NBA 2K26 review for PC, Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation

It’s been a very, very long time since I last played an NBA 2K game. I haven’t played any games in the series since NBA 2K20, which came out back in 2019 – a very different world, for a whole bunch of reasons – and, on the spur of the moment, I figured it might be time to check out how far the series had (or hadn’t) come over the past seven years.

I was unsurprised to find that one key aspect of the game hadn’t changed at all. NBA 2K26 is still very much a pay-to-win kind of game: sure, you can grind out game after game to build up your stats…but NBA 2K26 very much wants you to forgo all that, and just plunk down hundreds of dollars to buy up as much Virtual Currency as you need to instantly become a basketball god.

What’s different about NBA 2K26 compared to the last time I played is that it’s very much an online-focused game. You essentially have no choice but to install the game’s Anti-Cheat software, or else there’s almost nothing to do here because you’re not allowed to go online. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to play multi-player – even the MyPlayer career mode requires you to be online, regardless of whether you want to just focus on the story and play through the career of a young player stuck in the basketball backwater of Vermont. As someone who only ever plays single-player mode, it was kind of a shock to discover that pretty much the only thing I could do in this game – unless I wanted to install Anti-Cheat, which I wasn’t crazy about – was a pretty barebones franchise mode.

Obviously, if you’re the type who doesn’t care about adding on extra software or spending a few bucks for a game you’ve already paid for, then NBA 2K26 becomes a much more appealing prospect with its wealth of online-only modes.

And, of course, it should be noted that regardless of whether you’re playing online or offline, the actual basketball in NBA 2K26 is second-to-none. It never seems like annual sports games improve all that much year-to-year, and I always roll my eyes when a game brags about how many more animations it has and how it’s refined its gameplay. But if, like me, you haven’t played an NBA 2K in a couple of (or several) years, then the difference in gameplay is astonishing. The smoothness of everything was incredible. Watching the players run up and down the court, passing the ball around, throwing up jumpshots – it unquestionably feels more real to life now than it ever has, and it never felt like I was fighting with the controls or struggling to keep up.

(Mind you, I’d say that if you just want the offline experience, it’d be pretty hard to say that NBA 2K26 is worth it, no matter how smooth and naturalistic the gameplay may be.)

It should also be noted that getting to a point where I could actually play the game took far longer than you might expect. Even after the game is downloaded, you still need to wait for the game to do a secondary install of its shaders – a process that took the better part of an hour, even using the maximum number of cores. I tried playing the game without doing that first, and the results were a disaster: stuttery gameplay, lengthy stretches where players just stood around, and, finally, the game giving up and crashing. Obviously, if you have patience and allow the game to do everything it needs to do, it works just fine, but you need to know that NBA 2K26 isn’t just a game you’ll be able to start playing instantly after buying it.

All of which leads to the question: is NBA 2K26 worth buying? Again, it really depends on how much time or money – or both – you want to spend, and how much you want to have an online-only experience. If you’re fine with installing Anti-Cheat software and have no issues with either paying through the nose or grinding away to improve your player, then it’s hard to imagine a better basketball experience. But that’s a very big “if”, and if you just want a game you can pick up and play like you were able to a decade ago (or maybe more, at this point), those days are long gone.

2K provided us with a NBA 2K26 PC code for review purposes.