'EA Sports PGA Tour' looks great but that's about it

Unfortunately, there is so much wrong with 'EA Sports PGA Tour' that the few things it gets right are completely lost.

The problems start immediately when you open the game. The menu performance is terrible. It stutters and offers a few false starts before finally coming to life and letting you select between the different options.

Character creation offers a selection from a few uninspired pre-made models, then allowing you to change their face and hair from another set of options. Although on the surface there seems to be a lot of different faces to choose from, they seem to vary little other than in skin tone. A much better option here would have been adjustable sliders for the likes of nice size, mouth curvature, eye colour etc. to allow the player to create a truly custom character.

Considering how often the game shows you your own character, it would have been nice to offer more choice – and it would have been great if the characters didn’t all look so smug in the cutscenes between every shot. There are also only two choices for body type with no options to customize these and with very little difference between them. There is no way to adjust height, weight or anything else. It’s like they decided to do the opposite of 'Cyberpunk 2077', a game famous for (among other things) the incredible depth in the character creator for a game in which you rarely see your character other than in menus. 

Playing on a PC is almost impossible with a mouse and keyboard. A controller is essential to play this game and the game is keen to remind you of this fact many times throughout the initial setup. Even just navigating through the menus with M&K is tough. With bizarre design choices like ‘press U to continue’, ‘Right CTRL to zoom’ and ‘4 and 6 to rotate’. It genuinely feels like the designer responsible for porting the menu navigation from controller to mouse and keyboard has either never seen a keyboard, or is using some insane proprietary device that the rest of the world doesn’t know about. 

If you make it through all of this with your patience intact, you can finally get into a game of golf. But, how do you play? A very good question that the game doesn’t seem keen on answering as there is very little in the way of any kind of tutorial system. Initially, the mechanics seem fairly intuitive but quickly become extremely frustrating. There is a line to show the path of your ball and a greyed-out ellipse which is presumably supposed to show roughly where your ball will land or stop, though this wasn’t explained in our playthrough and was apparently easily missed if it was explained. The grey zone has little actual connection to what the ball will actually do though. If the flight path stops in a tree, the grey zone will still show further down the course as if there was no tree in the way. This led to many missed shots and near-constant aggravation. On top of this, the commentators are extremely repetitive.

If the mechanics were a little bit better it would have been easier to accept the broken menu and lazy PC porting, but they’re not. This feels less like a game and more like being gaslighted into madness. Which is a real shame because it was so close to being something that people – not just golfers – could enjoy. If it was a bit better executed this game would have been great to play to unwind after a high-intensity game of 'Call of Duty' or 'DOTA'.