NBA 2K26

Steam Reviews

Read all reviews on Steam

• Not recommended Posted April 23, 2026 on Steam Do not buy this game if you value your time and progress. I was permanently banned after 150 hours of completely legitimate gameplay with no specific explanation. I was grinding Street Kings and Open Athletics to complete an in game specialization quest that 2K themselves put in the game, and their automated anti-cheat system flagged me for it. I submitted a detailed appeal explaining exactly what I was doing and identifying legitimate background programs like Discord and a RAM optimizer that may have triggered their system. Multiple support agents responded but none of them ever told me what specific rule I violated despite asking multiple times. My appeal was denied with a copy paste response that didn't address anything I said. I am currently in the level 30s on the Season 6 battle pass without spending any money which shows consistent legitimate gameplay throughout the entire season. None of that mattered to their support team. Their anti-cheat system punishes legitimate players for simply playing the game as intended. Their support team is unresponsive and dismissive. If you get falsely banned there is essentially nothing you can do about it. Play at your own risk.
• Not recommended Posted May 6, 2026 on Steam This game is legit trash. Been playing 2k for over a decade and every year it just gets worse. The AI in the game is perhaps the most offensive aspect of the game, save for the never-ending force feeding of micro transactions. Defensive switches are mindless and completely against what real basketball is like. Your teammates wont shoot the open looks, but in double coverage will attempt a step back that bricks off the backboard. Your player will randomly move in a direction you dont input. The list goes on. The game makers should be ashamed and 2K should never be allowed to make another game. I hate with every ounce of my being the fact that this is the only available NBA game and it makes me sick to think we are stuck in this neverending nightmare. Ill never spend another dime on this franchise until another publisher takes over. I hope everyone involved in the creation of this monstrosity has a pillow thats hot on both sides, and has sand between their cheeks for the rest of their miserable lives.
• Not recommended Posted February 16, 2026 on Steam This is my first 2K game. I took the plunge after getting baited by some friends. The basketball itself is decent. My issue is with everything else. Every element of this game feels tailor made to waste your time and squeeze you for money. The multiplayer menu is an open world for no reason other than to waterboard you with advertisements. Do your weekly chores at the Gatorade™ Fitness Center for in-game player power. Wear your State Farm hoodie for an XP boost. Watch this 2KTV MasterCard ad reel while you're in queue. Oh, you want to play pickup? Run across this entire sponsor-lined strip mall until you reach the Park, then WAIT IN LINE until the game in front of you finishes. ((!?!?) Once you're on the court, you'll realize pretty quickly that stats matter a ton in this game. As a new player, my character moved like an accountant with asthma compared to max level players. Shooting and blocking, which are mostly stat checks, become unreasonably difficult with a stat disparity. The game makes it very clear that there's an easy fix for this: spending money! A new player can move like LeBron in their first week if they're willing to swipe a couple times. This game relies heavily on timing. Perfect shots occur when you make a precise input at a specific time. When you're in the practice mode and getting familiar with the gameplay, shooting feels intuitive and fun. Unfortunately...introduce online latency into the equation and the whole system breaks. The muscle memory and timing you built up in the gym goes out the window, and shooting becomes an educated guess. And because latency is variable depending on the lobby, it feels impossible to get the timing down as a low level character. Lastly, no Crossplay support on PC. And because 2K has a console-dominant playerbase...this game felt dead. Like very dead. Your options for finding queues are waiting 10+ minutes to find an evenly matched team, or waiting 5 minutes for a game to finish up at the Park where you'll likely get dog walked by a team of max level players. If you must play this game, play it on a console. Probably a 3/10 game with the actual basketball being the only redeeming factor. Everything else was bad enough to convince me to never buy a 2K game again.
• Recommended Posted January 18, 2026 on Steam Upvote is mostly because there's an option to start the game in offline-only mode without Easy Anticheat, which makes the game load faster and play much more stable than normal. EA's games still force you to load their anticheat before you even get the choice to choose an offline mode. Obviously this doesn't mean anything if you actually care about online, personally I don't (especially not that money-grubbing lootbox mode). But if you just wanna play some basketball without a kernel-level anticheat mucking up your system needlessly, it's a positive feature as far as I'm confirmed.
• Not recommended Posted September 7, 2025 on Steam UPDATE So much for "Easy Anti Cheat", just got out of a game of 3 on 3, where one player had 110 for all their stats, and their two teammates had 99 for all their stats. Uninstalling this junk and removing this game from my library. Don't waste your money buying this and putting some time into it. There's too little effort put into the single player experience by 2K to counter balance how bad the multiplayer experience is. ORIGINAL I finally decided to try to give NBA 2K a chance by buying it in release week. Previously in the past I've bought it when it goes on a big sale, usually after All-Star weekend, but by then everyone is already running around with 99 overall players. Well let me tell you, in release week, many people are still running around with 90+ overall players. They either have no life or they paid big bucks to get there as fast as possible. 2K orients so much of the MyPlayer gameplay content toward playing online in multiplayer, forcing you to go around The City to do even the most basic of things, and pressuring you to do multiplayer challenges or to buy more microtransactions the entire way. It's just so freaking lame. I want to be able to play with 60-80 overall rating players and win through fundamental good team basketball. Instead you have a bunch of players who paid their way to 90+ overall ratings who play like a bunch of circus clowns, spamming crossovers and off-balance 3s, that wouldn't be able to play defense against a grandma pushing their elderly walker down the court. It's so stupid playing with teammates with 90+ overall that allow the other team to cherry pick non-stop the entire game. It's like their actual basketball IQ is inversely proportional to their overall rating. For as long as 2K insists on focusing on multiplayer with terrible input lag, excessive microtransactions, and a lack of incentives for players to play good fundamental team basketball, I'm never buying another NBA 2K ever again.
• Not recommended Posted September 5, 2025 on Steam 12 minutes building shaders, black screen, players standing on the court doing nothing, Finally managed to play 5 min, didn't have fun and then game crashed. Refunded.