NBA 2K26 Impressions Thread

[Rori Daed]

I’ve already played 23 hours of NBA 2K26 in just 4 days… This game is like a big, overly sweet dessert : it looks tempting, but it’s way too sugary, and the sugar is just masking a lower-quality cookie underneath.

I don’t doubt it will still be successful because it’s more responsive : everything reacts faster now. Even double-teams trigger quicker, and the defense adapts faster (maybe even too fast). The only thing that ruins this speed and responsiveness is the dribbling, which is really choppy and ugly. You can chain completely unrealistic moves that would never happen in real life.

I could write a ton, but the bottom line is that the game still feels unfinished. The button mapping is worse than ever. For example, in triple threat position, it’s now impossible to advance your player with a dribble followed by a shot using the right stick. You can still do it with the shoot button, but not with the stick.

I also regret that hand-off passing is so underdeveloped. It’s still impossible to manually chain a hand-off pass into a roll or a fade.

And one last thing : your team always plays the same way on offense. I’ll repeat this because it’s just unbearable: your offense keeps repeating the same motions because the game constantly defaults to the “Motion” freelance. Even if you choose “Auto” in the menus, it never uses the team’s playbook : you have to do it manually. This is especially dumb for beginners, who end up playing the same offense over and over.

Overall, it feels like another unfinished game year, where microtransactions seem to be the only thing that really matters. NBA 2K isn’t the pinnacle it used to be. Back in the day, I genuinely felt motivated to play well : the game was first and foremost a basketball game, not just a video game.

PS: I’ve reported several bugs in the dedicated forum post, but I have a view counter linked to videos about these bugs, and nobody seems to watch them. I guess I’m wasting my time, and neither 2K, Beluba, nor Daczar actually look at what we write.

Interesting you say this about the offense. I found that when I was playing my friend my team was just running the most terrible repetitive offense, usually a ton of isolations, but then I played other games vs CPU or in PlayNow online and I got way more varied plays and stuff that looked like the pacers offense (which was the playbook I was running). So I guess there's something up here, I gotta look closer into what's happening and why sometimes the offense seems completely dumbed down and sometimes it seems fine