NBA 2K27 Screenshot
Image: Visual Concepts & 2K

If slicing up demons in feudal Japan isn't your thing, today's other big AAA release (not counting the several days of head start afforded to premium payers) is NBA 2K27, the latest in the long-running basketball sim series from Visual Concepts and 2K. It is also the poster child for NVIDIA's much-maligned DLSS 5 'neural rendering' technology, which allows you to generate an additional real-time sheen of AI-generated pseudo-photorealism–on top of the existing photorealism–at the cost of half your framerate or more. It (the game and the new tech) also isn't doing great with the greater Steam userbase.

While it has a largely captive audience (not exactly a huge range of big basketball games featuring real players to choose from), the players so far seem to be rattling at the bars of their cages. Initial grumbles include hard-to-control shooting, cheaters online, laggy multiplayer, and the story mode forcing players into arbitrary roles. No online crossplay, and even a few grumbling that despite the new graphics tech, the base visuals are a step down. It's all pretty damning, and many of these players are those who paid a premium to get in a week early, too.

As for the game itself, as is common for major sports game releases, NBA 2K27 is split into two halves. A story mode named MyCAREER (oh dear, the branding) where you lead your custom character from their days on the local street court to potential basketball stardom, with some branching story and RPG elements along the way. Honestly, I like seeing this kind of stuff in sports games, which otherwise hold little interest unless they're named Pyre. Still, there is co-op available in the story mode this time, but even that's catching flak for feeling threadbare.

That said, the real money-spinner here is the online mode, which is (as is also standard in modern sports games) a capitalist gacha nightmare. On top of paying for a full-priced premium game, you can optionally spend astronomical amounts of real money on virtual trading cards that let you add those players to your online team. Literally pay-to-win, but this has become the accepted nature of the beast.

What is new is the DLSS 5 technology. Effectively giving you the power to apply an Instagram yassification filter to everything you're playing in real-time. It's not quite fully generating an image - there's some genuinely impressive tech going on here to keep faces consistent even after retexturing them - but it does kinda make things look like a slightly-too-glossy airbrushed photo shoot. Aassy (yassy) hackers broke the locks off early, though, with this thread on ResetEra featuring some disconcerting/hilarious results.

While this is more the domain of Digital Foundry, my oh-so-hot take on this is that I don't like it, at least in its current iteration. It costs an enormous amount of rendering power (pushing even high-end Nvidia 5000-series cards to their limit) for an effect that, in optimal circumstances, looks okay-at-best and utterly aesthetic-obliterating at worst. It's a feature for people with far more money than sense. Which I guess fits in with the people emptying their bank accounts on virtual trading cards.

NBA 2K27 is out now for £60/$70, with an optional Ultra edition weighing in at an eye-watering £130/$150, including season passes (largely for unlocking cosmetics), a bunch of in-game currency, and a stack of random gacha draw card packs. Needless to say, I do not approve of this kind of pseudo-gambling price gouging, especially on top of a full retail game. But it seems to be the nature of the beast for modern sports games, regrettably.