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EA Sports PGA Tour 23 Review: Beautifully Realistic Golf
EA Sports PGA Tour is focused on getting the most detail-oriented, technologically possible approach for a realistic golf video game. Developer EA Orlando & EA Madrid and publisher Electronic Arts acquired exclusive licensing to include the top golf tournaments. The Masters Tournament, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open Championship, and The Open are all represented, along with the Augusta National Women's Amateur, the FedExCup, and many more.
In a ***** PGA Tour interview, developers talked about what went into the course design process to make EA Sports PGA Tour as realistic as possible with the 30 courses currently available. The game is designed to feel incredibly immersive from the ground up and is genuinely photo-realistic on machines that are capable of handling the highest graphic settings.
EA Sports PGA Tour is stunning, and on the highest graphics settings, even the crowds along the sides of each course can feel realistic. The physics are crafted to take into account the slightest changes in the environment, swing controls, and more with a mind-blowing amount of things to tweak to get each shot just right. Unfortunately, this also creates a very steep learning curve for any casual players of the game, without a lot of leeways given when an amateur is truly an amateur.
Just as in a real-life golf career, as a player improves their golf game, they get to progress through different championships and events. EA Sports PGA Tour offers different ways to work on practicing, whether through trying to play through the Korn Tour, attempting to beat Challenges that the game sets up for players, grabbing a friend for some of the many multiplayer modes, or simply working on beating a player's own score in Stroke play.
The sports announcers in EA Sports PGA Tour are highly entertaining. Though it can be discouraging to hear the announcers making comments when things are going poorly during a round, the voice-over work is very smooth and features a large enough library of commentary that repeated statements are uncommon. This can help bring a person into the game and adds a lot to the immersion.
The Challenges mode within EA Sports PGA Tour offers several unique snapshots from games where a player is placed in a certain situation, often with a backstory of a real-life occurrence that event came from, and then are given three criteria they must accomplish to complete the Challenge.
Physics and environmental data were all closely analyzed in creating EA Sports PGA Tour, even to ensure that the ball behaves with next-gen responsiveness. When a shot is made, whether a long drive or a short putt, the ball will spin, bounce, dribble, and roll just as it would in real life on that course. Golf swing mechanics are applied based on the players' own movements with the controller, and according to developers, the use of EA Sports Pure Strike technology with PGA Tour ShotLink and TrackMan data gives a highly accurate result of what would have happened on a real golf course.
Considering how much of the player character is seen throughout the game, both in cut scenes and in lining up every shot, EA Sports PGA Tour should have made more options for character design. The women's hair in particular is poorly created considering the impressive technology used everywhere else. Currently, there seem to also be some bugs in registering swing mechanics with a controller joystick, which can be game-breaking with the amount of precision necessary for EA Sports PGA Tour. While hopefully that will be corrected with updates, at the time of this review, it made an already challenging game nearly impossible.
EA Sports PGA Tour is an absolutely beautiful and immersive golf game with a very realistic feel. The game can be quite demanding on even some of the better systems, so PC users should be forewarned to check the requirements and be ready to turn down graphic settings. It is a challenging game, but still a lot of fun and is a great foundation for players to become better with the ability to see true growth happening as they continue to practice, as long as the player has enough patience to get there.
EA Sports PGA Tour is available now for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
