The Golf Club was an unusual presence in sporting events. An unlicensed independent game, it was popular enough to inspire a sequel that attracted the interest of the PGA and 2K Games, who joined forces with the series’ creator, HB Studios, to grant a licence to the third instalment. The series changed its name to PGA Tour 2K21 and switched to a bi-annual release cycle. By bringing Tiger Woods on board for PGA Tour 2K23, the previously known as The Golf Club series achieved a new milestone and effectively ended any chance of EA exploiting the golf celebrity for quite some time.
The foundation of the series has remained mostly the same throughout its run. The control scheme is the first, and if you’ve played other titles in this series or earlier Tiger Woods games starting with the PS2, you’ll be familiar with it. You may fine-tune the strength and direction of each swing using either an analogue stick on a controller or your mouse; to increase the strength of your shot, draw back until you touch the marker, then push up to unleash the swing.
While swinging anyplace else sets the metre on the side of the golfer in a curved pattern, making it look more realistic as you get a better indication of how forceful your swing is, putting forces you to utilise a straight line to evaluate your shot. It implies that you’ll need to practise a lot, but it also gives you a lot of control.
Even while the control method is excellent, not everyone may prefer using a mouse or analogue stick, so the series also offers a three-click control method as a backup. While most games, like the original Golf on the NES, may bring up recollections of this, you’ll find that the mechanism is very different in practice. You start by pressing a button more and more until the boundaries of the circle reach the desired level of power. The next step is to observe as a needle rotates counterclockwise while you strike twice in the indicated yellow spots to gauge your swing’s precision and straightness. Even though it seems easy on paper, playing at higher difficulty levels can be challenging without practice.
Although the majority of people will probably continue using the analogue swing technique, those who are unable to make solid stick motions may appreciate the alternative approach.
The next pillar of the series is realistic golf physics, and the game adheres to that very faithfully. There is never a time when flawless shots cause the ball to fly or the bounce on the ground to be mysterious. The HUD’s simple design, which requires several button presses to get certain crucial information like wind speed and direction, is the only drawback. The game accommodates beginning players by providing you with a wide berth so that shots that aren’t straight still have a decent chance of landing in a good region, much like the control method does.
At some point, at least at the lower levels, you’ll need to widely swing your shot to the left or right to veer off course.
The last step is customisation. In terms of diversity and attention to detail, player customization doesn’t quite match the original Tiger Woods series, but it comes close enough to allow you to build any character you like in surprisingly good detail. The only drawback is that these golf-related creations cannot be shared publicly. The course creator, on the other hand, allows you to easily import all of your PGA Tour 2K21 courses and share every creation with the world.
The system is still complex if you want to start from scratch, and the abundance of backdrops, objects, and tools allows you to partially recreate the official PGA Tour courses that are absent because of a lack of licencing.
These are all integrated into a few, albeit entertaining, modes that will keep you busy for a while. In casual mode, you and up to three other players can take on any course with any constraints you choose. Casual mode is exactly what it sounds like. You can utilise the fictional character you created or any other professional golfer. Golfers like Lexi Thompson and Lydia Ko are added to the list, along with male players like Tiger Woods and Rickie Fowler.
Starting with the character creation process, you can give your golfer a kind depending on whether they want to focus on putting, driving down the fairway, or being all-around golf pros. From there, you can begin in Q-School, the Korn Ferry Tour, and the Championship, or you can proceed directly to the PGA Tour if you want to skip the lower leagues and focus on the FedEx Cup.
The mode’s ability to finally provide more than one way to level up is among its more intriguing features. Every form of play awards you XP, which can then be used to buy qualities that are tied to how you interact with the various club types. That opens up a few advantages that alter the way you play.
In contrast, the game forgoes the usage of new clubs to improve stats in favour of fittings, which achieve the same result and let you select the clubs that you think look the best. The title is fairly generous considering that equipping the fittings costs in-game cash. You just need to buy the fittings once, and you can use them on every club in your collection. As a result, before you have to worry about saving money and competing in tournaments, you have some actual freedom to experiment with a variety of fits.
In terms of “cost beyond the initial purchase,” PGA Tour 2K23 falls between NBA 2K23 and WWE 2K23 for those who are familiar with the way 2K Sports operates. Since much of the stuff you’ll buy in the career mode will be aesthetic, you can’t precisely buy your way through it or use the money to become uber-powerful. The expenses of equipping fittings are so low that even if you can purchase in-game currency, it feels pointless. The goods available for purchase are all cosmetic, removing them from the confines of the company’s NBA game.
While there is a free tier, the majority of the cosmetics in the season pass can only be obtained by playing at the premium level. To get all of those items more quickly, you might be tempted to purchase a pass with a boost. This isn’t ideal for a game you’ve already paid for, but it could be worse.
The name-brand golf balls that have their stats are the only real consumable you have at your disposal, but because of their short shelf life, you have to keep buying them.
While the numbers on paper can give you an advantage on the green, the shortcomings of each ball prevent them from being magic bullets. The majority of gamers can simply resist the urge and continue using alternative, more robust fits.
PGA Tour 2K23 still has a good visual appearance. The character models for your fictional golfer and the pros are extremely attractive, but you can’t help but notice that the crowd is always looking in the same direction. Although there is a fair degree of detail in the landscapes, this is not exactly a next-generation facelift. Animations are beneficial until you realise that you occasionally pantomime to the audience without facing them. The main criticism is that, if there is any difference at all from PGA Tour 2K21, it requires a very keen eye to spot it. Even if the game’s previous iteration looked quite nice, this isn’t a serious criticism, but those hoping for a significant update after two years won’t be too pleased.
The game’s High texture preset on the Steam Deck makes it look fantastic on the device’s screen with a frame rate that varies between 40 and 50 fps. It also means that the experience is stressful because just being on the course reduces the battery’s playtime from a full charge to less than two hours. The game includes several tools to facilitate improvement, such as a resolution upscaling slider. It’s not too horrible to set the setting to Medium. However, the game on the Deck maintains the previous reputation of the sport as being surprisingly hard on PCs in general.
In the end, despite several obvious flaws that don’t impair the gameplay, PGA Tour 2K23 maintains the series’ reputation as a reliable golf game. Although the goal of creating a realistic golf simulator has not changed, innovations like swing forgiveness and a new control scheme allow more players of lower ability levels to join in and have fun.
