Draft Day Sports: College Basketball 2026

It's the same as the last game which isn't a bad thing if you like the last game but it's definitely not worth the expensive price tag. It should be $20 max. I'll still recommend because it's solid but you can definitely live without this game feels like a cash grab

Game has a lot of promise but still too clunky to be of any value at this time. I am really hoping after some big patches a lot of these things can be resolved but for a game released a few days ago it does seem to be slightly rushed. This is my first game from these developers so I am unsure of how it has progressed from previous versions of the game but here are my initial thoughts. The good: Game day - I enjoyed the actual gameplay on game days, making subs watching your team move the ball around, setting tactics was tons of fun. Player info - Opening up a players bio screen particularly during recruiting was great. The layout was super easy to read, you got a good understanding of their skill breakdown and interests. Polls/News Articles/Major events - One of my favorite parts of the game is checking in on the polls and news articles. They provided some cool insight and kept the season's progression fun. Major events such as tournament draw having a little cut scene with announcers was really cool. Would love to see this expanded on, more content, different dialog. The breakdown of matchups during tournament seeding is really cool would love to see more in that area. Add a post/preseason event too, maybe frame it as a local tv sports show doing previews and reviews on the users team? Linked with DDS Basketball - Very cool feature love it when games build on each other. I think it is a super underrated feature for college based games. The meh: Depth Chart - Seems to do too much here, you don't truly select a depth chart you assign your "starters" off of the minutes played. I would like these separated, set my depth chart to see who is filling out the position and then another screen to assign minutes played. Setting the depth chart solely by minutes is fine for how you want the team to line up but the roster is a cleaner view of who is on the team and where I personally rank them so flipping back and forth between the two and reorganizing the chart makes it a pain at times. Team Rosters - Every start of a league these players are randomized. You can select the worst team in the league and still have them pull a 3-4 star recruit who can carry you to the tournament. I prefer doing rags to riches runs so this can make it frustrating if setting up everything up you get rolled a good team roster. Would like a static set roster myself and then let the randomization of prospects influence growth. Settings in general - Setting up a new league can take a little time. Would love it if we could save these as a personal file so I can quickly load them in for new saves. Pipelines in Recruiting - Never seen this come into play, would be cool if there was more information or at least some filters to find prospects within your pipelines? I think it is loosely driven off of coaches hired, since they look to have their own pipelines but really unsure the impact or hard to identify prospects who fit that category. Overall timing - It is hard to understand where you are at in the process of the season. During transfer negotiations/recruiting knowing how many weeks are left (during the offseason). Or what steps you have left in general. There is the notification window but that seems like it is too small for it being the primary driver of timelines. The bad: UI - Probably the most frustrating part of the game. The first two tabs on your UI are useless. Listing all of the conferences and teams provide no value throughout the season and end up getting in the way more often than not. Notification popups are key to keep you informed on what part of the off season you're in and they don't link you to the correct screen to complete the task. Often you are reading it and trying to follow instructions to navigate to proceed. There are also a ton of issues navigating between screens. Going into gameday there are bright aggressive flashes of white while the game loads into various screens. Causes a ton of eye fatigue and strain over long gaming periods. The email notifications that pop up during simulation will sometimes not appear, if you click on it the entire game will reload. Popups have reappeared or retriggered multiple times. Another big issue with the UI is if you click into one of the other teams, your UI will bug out and start showing that team as if you are coaching them. I had a save where I could flip between the two rosters by selecting the team portrait next to the coaches picture. Also your team's dropdown within the UI is often too short and hard to select. Recruiting - Very clunky and hard to understand at first. The Help screen does provide additional context but having an initial introduction to the process would be really nice. Progression through the season trying to convince players to join you is also pretty bare bones. You can scout/watch film/ invite onsite or speak with them on interests. Though these things have no tangible progression, having some type of point system associated with it would be nice to see if you're actually making an impact instead of just making assumptions based on their responses in emails. Also you can kinda cheat the system by finding 4 and 5 star recruits who somehow have zero interest from other teams. Pools in those areas probably need to be reduced. A no prestige school can essentially retool year 1 with these prospects. Team Moral/Meetings - Another frustrating part of the game, moral doesn't have a great flow. My team was ranked and on a massive win streak but team moral was in the red with no explanation as to why. I assumed correcting it is texting players and telling them to correct their attitude but who knows if that is correct or not. Simulation - They give an option to sim the season but kick you out of it every time your game shows up. Why have the option to sim to end without allowing players to do so. Offseason - The offseason has a few tweaks I would like to see around progression. Primarily player and staff progression are near impossible to see. Players you have to go into their bio and see progression one by one and it is only by season. If stats only increase or decrease per year then we should have an offseason player progression screen to easily see those stat adjustments. Staff progression should also follow the same model as you cant see progression without noting what their stats were at the beginning of the season. Ideally an XP model with your season progression counting towards how much they grow would be ideal. Feels lackluster. Transferring players - This one was one of the more frustrating things, I had a player transfer year 1 without ever showing up on the prospective transfer list and completely blow up my team into season 2 since I had no way of accounting for him leaving. Program progression - Another one where the stats or money invested seemed glossed over. During budget allocation you can assign it to training/med/lifestyle, what impact that actually has though isn't visible at all. You have no idea if it levels anything up, help text talks about how they can downgrade if not allocated properly but no where to know if you've met that threshold or not. Also the board request at the beginning of the offseason is super bad too. You get to request one improvement and there are no adjustments automatically based on performance. So if you want to improve facilities you get to deal with a bad budget for another year. I look to Football Coach College Dynasty model for a bare minimum here. Give us a budget with sliders that clearly show your programs levels in things such as campus lifestyle, academics, facilities, media etc and have bonuses tied to them that either increase the programs performance or attractiveness for recruits.

Please read my full review. I give the game a positive review because if you are playing it for the first time, it is legitimately the best college basketball simulator that you could possibly get. Every other college basketball game is an AI slop fest. Whenever I played this game for the first time. I felt like I was still just playing the 2025 game. Everything felt the same. The game has been streamlined to new players more, which is cool. But nothing has really changed. Its still the same game outside of that. I am not going to pretend like I know what it is like to release a video game. I"ll just give Andy advice to Wolverine Studios. Dont make a yearly release of a game if you are not able to make yearly improvements to it. Especially if you are unlicensed. The game is good. It is really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good. Take all of your money you were planning to spend on developing the next game and put it into advertising for this one instead.

I will say, I have not played any other entry in the series. I think the other reviews talk about that in depth so if you have, read those. For first time players and fans of college basketball, I could not recommend this game more. There are some issues (the menus are hard to access and the game takes ages to load during the offseason) but this is such a fun game. It scratches the same itch as other sport sim games, like Football Manager. I do wish that there was an option to choose how much NIL we can spend on players (as opposed to the current options of Low, Average, and High offers). However, I do still highly recommend.

GREAT gem! One of the BEST basketball simulations I've EVER played!! I do NOT think it's the same as 2025, the UI is MUCH improved and there's a lot of little details that are very nice indeed, and are new to the '26 vers! Wish this would catch on more with say, fans of like the old-school March Madness gemz, or College Hoops 2K series, as the simulation aspect of this gem CANNOT be beat!! It's very, very accurate, with lots of great advanced stats and stuff to tinker with, things to do and plenty of stats to keep on top of. Lots of strategy involved and just a lovely experience for a longtime college hoops fan. TOP SHELF stuff here, first class!! Thanks dev for the hard work year after year! <3

Its simple. THIS GAME IS LEGENDARY!!

Fun game and low-end PC friendly

Awesome game, NIL made it so much better. Logos and stuff from the forum always help the game feel amazing. I might just be dumb but I can't get the logos working on the new court display only the old one In terms of the game Negative Freshman even with the updates are probably still too good On brutal recurting in universe mode, was able to get one of the best 10 players in the portal to Presbyterian (20 team prestige) but even the standard of player I can pick up with them seems too high overall, compared to another team I have in the game, team prestige around 50 Would love a way to change the tournament size to the new modal recently introduced by the NCAA (I know thats probably hard for the developer to code on the fly) Defensive pressing/trapping etc, I've had teams stacked with good defender, elite defenders, high ath, no matter what I can't get them to be elite defensively as they would be just in a simple MTM with no pressing Having 4 teams at various levels, Power 5, High, Mid, Low majors I like trying to platy different styles but almost every time i end up just M2M D being the best to win and motion offense unless I've got a stretch 5, within this part I wish the offensive focus was more dramatic, heavy outside I'd still love more overall 3s being shot And injury redshirts Positive Basically everything else in the game From recuritng to now the portal being the best part, trying to recruit a whole new roster in some occasions but also still finding ways to have those 4 or 5 year seniors playing every season at the same school is awesome. Media, Mag. award. history screens everything like that show so much detail Best college basketball game on the market