EA Sports PGA Tour Review – A Frustrating Slice

EA brings back the PGA with a confusing and frustrating simulation. It is still trying to figure its identity. While gorgeous, with pro golf’s best interactive presentation, the on-the-course action delivers inconsistent results.

EA is the winner in licensing. They score key courses such as Pebble Beach and the Masters. Presentation counts, like the Masters’ first day showing opening tee shots from Jack Nicklaus and others. During flybys, quiet commentary provides meaningful commentary about each hole. The courses are surrounded by stunning views. Every individual blade of grass can be seen, including on the fairway. Every hole has realistic looking spectators. However, their inability to react when hit with a ball takes away the feeling of immersion.

Prestige comes with a cost – this is a daunting golf sim. The fairways and greens are stuck in their most difficult/fastest settings. Although the analog stick swing works logically, results can vary and there is little information about what caused a tee shot to cut toward trees. Each stroke takes into account forward and backswing speeds, length, loft, wind and more. That’s true to the sport, as any one of those can cause a botched shot, yet EA’s PGA Tour doesn’t allow a sense of what’s going wrong at the moment.

With the ball airborne, a small window shows the analog stick’s motion, and any left/right deviation (no matter how small) means a drastic gaffe. This is more helpful when the ball moves in a straight line, regardless of how small it may be. Greens are a poor guide, showing only the ball track and not indicating what it is to be aiming at. It misses if it swings a little too hard or isn’t straight enough, even on the easy.

Elements from EA’s retired Tiger Woods series remain. The possibility to add power and spin while the ball is going skyward by pressing a button during the backswing, which was a completely unrealistic choice. That’s the crisis facing EA Sports PGA Tour, trapped with the studio’s arcade-esque legacy while competing with golf-sim rival 2K Sports. 

You can only set up a career as the single long-term player mode. However, you are limited by the limitations of your character creator. The menus are limited to generic head and a small selection of clothing, with the possibility for the game’s in-game shop to expand the range.

From there, it’s a matter of entering tournaments, playing majors, and leveling up. Although earning XP is quick at the beginning, the last stages of each stat are slow and currency accumulation takes a while. To speed this up, the PGA Tour urges its players to spend anywhere from $5 to $50 in-game cash to buy new shirts or a +3 power boost. The pressure to spend is magnified by the slow pace of progress.

Training challenges offer sponsorships and XP, but it’s clumsy and tedious. Each typically lasts for a few swings – say, a driving accuracy test – then back to a loading screen, then the menu.

Sometimes, graphic beauty can cause problems. Before a crucial Masters tee shot, a fan’s body blocked the swing meter. Tall grass does the same, even if it’s translucent. Power becomes a guess because the meter doesn’t show, making the already-brutal difficulty unfair.

The ability to level allows for additional swing types such as power drives. These fit EA’s brand, akin to Madden’s X-Factors, but like the backswing button mashing, they seem like misfits in a game true to golf. While some shot types make sense, it’s illogical that many of these need to be unlocked in the first place; imagine going to the PGA without basic skills.

EA Sports PGA Tour captures every nuance and detail of golfing. Unfortunately, it is difficult for users to understand what the system can do from an analog stick. This makes it frustrating. EA Sports PGA Tour is a game at odds with whether it wants to compete with rival 2K’s realism or veer closer to its own more arcade roots, and in the process, lands its first drive on this new round in the rough.