EA Sports PGA Tour Review

The license is the pitch. This is the only golf game holding all four majors, and Augusta National in particular is rendered with a fidelity that borders on documentary, from the pine straw to the specific slope of the twelfth green. The ball flight model, built on real shot tracking data, produces trajectories that look right on the replay camera, and the course scanning work is the most impressive thing EA has done in the sport.

The problem is what happens between your hands and that ball. Swing feedback is vague enough that two nearly identical inputs return different outcomes without explaining why, tempo is punished inconsistently, and the putting model reads greens for you until the skill drains out of it. Career progression is a thin skill tree bolted onto a schedule with no narrative shape at all. Launch stability was poor, with disconnects, missing stat tracking and long loads. A beautiful course simulator in search of a golf game.