- Staff
- #1
Publisher: 2K
Developer: 2K
Website: pgatour.2k.com
Genre: Sports
Player(s): Up to 4 locally, many online
System(s): PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PC
Release Date: October 14th 2022
Well... I wasn't looking forward to this. I wasn't a huge fan of 2K21, which IMO made way too many realism sacrifices to try and bring in the EA crowd (Rory McIlroy PGA Tour was the easiest, silliest golf game I've ever played).
There were some core issues in 2K21 that never seemed to be considered for fixing, and there was so much silence from the devs that when they suddenly started advertising 2K23, it felt like an insult. "We didn't care what you thought for two years but make sure you buy our new game!"
Well, with other sports games letting me down hugely this year, I thought I'd give it a go.
I'll be damned if I'm not having an absolute blast with this.
I'm not sure if swings on the Xbox controller are just harder than the PlayStation (where I last played), but I have to be super, super focused just to hit a straight shot on the default difficulty (that's really important to me - play offline or online and by default it's a realistic, very difficult but incredibly satisfying grind).
They've added gear with various buffs and an RPG-style skill tree, which was a huge red flag to me - "it's going to get super easy when I've unlocked everything", I thought. But... It's actually really innovative (I've not known another game that does it like this).
Rather than the buffs give you increased shot distance or accuracy all the time, they only kick in when you meet certain conditions - and they tend to be "bad" conditions, not "good" conditions - i.e...
...you only get the benefit of the buffs when you're playing like shit (or, at best, okay). For example, miss the fairway from a drive three times in a row, and your fourth drive will get a slight accuracy boost. Is it me, or is that absolutely genius? It means you're never really overpowered, and if you are, it's not for very long.
I've put in 10+ hours so far (believe me, that's unusual for me) and I'm not seeing many negatives. It's punishingly difficult (if you don't choose to make it easier), the AI is great (and customisable at an overall level - there are some sliders for things like the AI's day-to-day score variation during a tournament)... I mean, the graphics are fairly poor (due to all the courses being built with the equivalent of LEGO parts), and the commentary is wrong nearly all the time ("this putt to get into the top 5 of the leaderboard", when it takes me to 24th)... But who cares about that.
So yeah, I'm really impressed! I'm just hoping they don't back down from this vision via updates, which is easy to imagine when people complain (as I've already seen) that it's "impossible to score well".
I was really looking forward to EA's golf game given that it's got the Masters licensing etc. but now I've played this, I can't imagine they would ever, ever make such a serious sim-based sports game.