The sun is shining, the flowers are starting to open and it’s a long weekend. There’s no better time to experience the annual Augusta Masters tournament… from the comfort of your own home while playing the EA Sports PGA Tour. While the actual event took place last weekend, golfers may be more interested in EA’s return to the world of golf with the launch of the EA Sports PGA Tour.
While following this title closely (because I firmly believe that golf is one of the best sports to adapt to a video game since it works very well in digital format), this week I also visited the golf course to being able to assess whether EA’s return to digital golf is something to celebrate or something to avoid.
My conclusion is that if you’re a fan of the sport, it’s worth cheering for the release of this game. Don’t get me wrong, EA Sports PGA Tour isn’t perfect and has its flaws (I’ll get to those in a moment), but overall it’s a very well-done golf title. It gets even better thanks to its range of courses, the best you could ask for.
EA has been proclaiming to the rooftops that this game is “home of the majors,” and with good reason. Men’s Golf Majors (Majors) are the most challenging and compelling tournaments in the world, and are held at the legendary and exclusive Augusta National, historic St Andrews, sunny Southern Hills and 30 other non-exclusive courses that form part of the extensive PGA Tour Circuit (like scenic Pebble Beach, boisterous TPC Scottsdale, Riviera Country Club complex, etc.). Every time you play golf at one of these locations, you will feel like you are in a place steeped in history. This feeling is reinforced as the commentators continually provide a variety of informative facts about the history of golf or tips that may assist you during the game. Because the courses are detailed, this title perfectly represents the challenge of completing a PGA Tour-level course.
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Because these panels were created using photogrammetry and other sophisticated techniques to digitally recreate them with extreme accuracy, they appear to be real. The delicate irregularities of each green and hole pose challenges to overcome and each branch is an additional obstacle to confront. In addition, the perspective of the fairways and the location of the sand traps mean that hitting the ball with a driver can end in disaster. The atmosphere at each golf course is excellent: you have brilliant flora and attention to detail, proximity to water or the ocean, and huge crowds of fans who follow you to every tournament and cheer you on. The reason why EA hasn’t released this title on next-gen consoles is obvious: fine details are the forte of EA Sports PGA, but sports game developers at EA still don’t know how to animate human faces. Without exaggeration, the characters are creepy, although this problem is already known to fans of FIFA, Madden and F1.
The gameplay offers a nice combination of depth and simplicity. If you just want to play a little golf, you can ignore all the different types of complex shots and RPG systems and just play nine holes to see what score under par you can get. If you want to deepen your game, you can explore the different ways to hit the ball down the fairway or drop it from the rough onto the green.
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The dynamic itself can be very difficult to understand and master. I won’t deny that the crude mechanics of analog golf club swings have frustrated me countless times, especially on short shots where it’s all too easy to send the ball into the stratosphere. It is necessary to make mistakes on several occasions in order to end up understanding how everything works. The tutorial doesn’t help players much, but that’s exactly why EA included various training and sponsorship challenges to master the more specific types of shots and mechanics required for a PGA Tour golfer. Each of them gives you experience necessary to level up and more skill points to improve your golfer.
When it comes to the RPG genre, the career mode (where it’s predominant) is excellent. The goal is to try and do your best in each tournament of the PGA Tour season to improve your overall ranking and move up. So you can spend your skill points on improving your golfer’s strength, putting technique, short game and many other areas that fall into these broader categories (e.g. accuracy or control when using blinkers and other golf clubs). short game). The system allows you to see the improvement after each tournament. At the beginning of your career it will be difficult for you to reach 250 in the rankings and to be able to correctly hit a short shot from more than two yards, but when you get to Augusta after a few months of the season you will have one short shot to more than ten feet with ease and you will be in the top 150 (or even higher) in the global rankings.
What impresses me the least about the game is the customization as it is tied to the microtransactions. You cannot upgrade your golfer by buying a new club with real money, but you can purchase upgrades to improve certain attributes of your clubs or shot types, as well as buy tournament tickets. I’m disappointed that the only way to get new skins for the gym bag is to pay real money, because then there is no free way to improve and change the golfer’s appearance. Not that I’m the biggest fan of skins and looks, but it would be a huge plus if there were more options not tied to premium currency and sometimes even (surprisingly) loot boxes.
Also, playing requires being logged into EA’s servers to access most game modes, including career mode. I honestly hate it and don’t understand why I need to connect a PlayStation Network account to EA Account systems to only be able to play 75% of the EA Sports PGA Tour.
Since I’m complaining, it’s the turn of the game’s menus and UI, which frankly are very slow, unnecessarily complex, and frustrating. It takes far too many buttons to accomplish anything important, and trying to find a better angle for a shot by moving the camera across the track requires such a level of focus and skill that I almost ended up doing it preferred to simply photograph by eye based on the information I received as to where my golfer was staying. It’s a game, not real life, so that shouldn’t be necessary.
Still, the variety of game modes in EA Sports PGA Tour is impressive. In addition to Career mode, in which the goal is to become the ultimate golfer, and Quick Play, in which you can take part in a series of quick games with slightly different styles (e.g. Best Ball, in which two teams of two compete against each other, or skins where players fight hole by hole for money in the game), there’s also Social, the unranked multiplayer mode, Competitive, the simultaneous online action mode where you can see what your rivals are doing in real time ( as if they were ghosts on the court ) or Tournament, the most challenging competition mode. If all of that isn’t enough for you, private games and challenges allow you to create your own tournaments and hone your skills.
Despite the game having some pretty odd bugs (like lighting that changes your golfer’s hair color), overall EA Sports PGA Tour is a fun and enjoyable golf game that excels at what matters most: the game’s dynamics , the fields and the experience . If you’re looking for a way to fully immerse yourself in the world of golf, watching the Masters and playing the EA Sports PGA Tour is a good idea. The only thing I recommend is that you stay away from the Store tab if you want to avoid a big disappointment.
