When the days start to get longer and temperatures begin to warm, it means that golf season is right around the corner. To gear up for another year of hitting the links, publisher 2K and developer HB Studios have released the newest entry into their biennial series, PGA Tour 2K25. While the team has bucked the sports trend of releasing a new game every year, the hardest part of serialized sports games will always be the tug-of-war between keeping what worked and what fans enjoyed while also looking to add enough to justify its existence. 2K25 certainly adds to the previous offering, but whether you feel like it adds enough will depend on what you enjoy about these types of games.
What hasn’t really changed is the core gameplay. This game is fun; it can be frustrating at times, but it could be argued that frustration is also one of the core aspects of golf. The control schemes from the last outing have returned, so you have access to the swing stick method and the 3-click method, but both have been tweaked to give even more control over how your golfer performs. This year, there are 4 parts to your swing: contact, rhythm, transition, and swing path, and based on how you move the stick or how precise you are with your button presses will determine how the ball flies. Swing path is your downward motion on the stick, transition is how you move from down to up, and contact is how you push the stick up, while rhythm takes the whole thing into account based on how fluid the movements were. The 3-click method has you pressing and holding as well as tapping buttons to indicate how you will perform in each facet, and it is still the easier of the two methods.
When playing on most of the difficulty levels, messing up timing or stick direction still results in wild shanks, missed chips, and repeated attempts to get out of bunkers. This game wants you to feel like you are on the tour, and if you are not good enough with your swing controls you will quickly start to see scores you may be used to seeing when you play your local courses and feel less like the pro you want to be, and more like a weekend hacker. The mid to high difficulties also remove helpful features like putt path, where you can see how your aim would result if you hit it perfectly, so you are at the mercy of how well you can read the green slopes.
To compensate for this, this year’s game has introduced the “Perfect Swing” setting for difficulty. This reduces how much you are punished by incorrect movements and lessens the impacts of external factors like wind speed and direction. When playing in this mode, you almost always hit the ball where you want and it makes the game much easier and more “pick up and play” making it the perfect option for newer players, for friends who come over and don’t have time to practice, or for those who just want to relax and enjoy rounds without wanting to snap their controller. The settings can also be tweaked at any time, so you are not locked into any one difficulty for any mode or round, except for ranked online play, which does lock in the Pro setting and swing stick controls. Online play now includes ranked tours, in addition to ranked solo or duo modes, and societies can now have players from across all platforms, so more friends can get in on the action regardless of where they play.
When it comes time to use those controls, 2K25 gives you more options than ever in terms of where you want to play. The game still features a robust course editor to create the course of your dreams, and you can import your custom courses from previous games. The TopGolf mode has returned as well for a more fun practice environment and a great mode for competing against friends. This year, the game also includes 27 officially licensed courses so you can play where the pros do. In the two previous games, there were only 17 and 20 official courses, so it is nice to see the franchise continuing to add to the number of famous locales. The game faithfully recreates these courses with all of the familiar features and things like stands and crowds lining the course that you would expect to see when watching tournaments from home. The game is beautiful, with impressive lighting and details, and is the best looking entry in the series so far. The team looks to have taken advantage of only having to develop for the current generation, having left the Playstation 4 and Xbox One behind.
The presentation can be a little lacking at times, as you don’t always get player reactions when making a good shot or sinking a long putt, as the game will cut to the view of a random hole as it transitions you to the next hole. The commentary in-game is also lacking, as playing a quickplay round has commentary that feels more like your caddie talking to you, whereas the commentary on tour in the Career mode feels more like watching on TV. That naturally makes more sense since that is meant to be the tour events and should feel like you are watching on TV, but the lack of proper commentary makes playing outside of the career feel a bit hollow. Player models look okay, as you can mostly tell who you are looking at, but limited reaction variety means that players will have similar looks regardless of what happened in the game, but that isn’t as important as how the courses look in a game like this where you mostly see players’ backs and sides.
When it comes to players, 2K25 does not live up to the previous entry, as it reduces the number of available Pro players from 14 to 11, and one of those 11 isn’t actually a pro golfer. While the number of playable pros is reduced, the game offers over 200 pros as possible players on the leaderboards when playing in the My Career mode. This helps with the immersion of feeling like your player is on tour with lots of familiar names, as limiting the leaderboard to made-up names and the 11 pros would have been very underwhelming. The lack of playable pros is a letdown, given that adding a limited number of them last year was a welcome addition. This may be partially related to how the landscape of the pro game has changed since 2022, but nonetheless, having only 10 pros and Chris “Shooter McGavin” McDonald to choose from limits the replayability for the casual modes.
Where PGA 2K has always put the majority of its focus is in the My Player and My Career modes. These allow you to create a player of your own design or choose from templates and take them on tour with you. You can start at the bottom in Q school and work your way up or jump in on either the Korn Ferry or PGA tours from the jump. Both have gotten significant changes this time around, and there is more than ever to adjust, change, or improve about your player. The role-playing game elements added last year are more robust than ever. The game offers various skill trees to improve all aspects of your game, so you can see how each adjustment raises your player’s skills and level. The game allows you to add fittings to clubs and specialty balls that each have their own stat improvements so you can tweak your players in any way that you want, so no two players will necessarily progress through the same way.
Each week in the career mode has the main event, which you can customize how much or little you play by determining how many rounds are played for the event, and you can sim through events playing only 4 holes and letting the computer handle the rest. The week also offers practice rounds, where you play a random selection of holes to help learn the course, as well as specific training modes where you try and hit targets on the practice range. Playing these additional options each week gives you stat boosts and items to use in the My Player settings.
While skill points are earned for the skill trees to improve certain things, improving your player overall takes both attribute points and virtual currency. This wades into the “pay-to-win” model rampant in other sports games, as you can always buy virtual currency with real money to up your stats more quickly. This same virtual currency is also used to buy cosmetic items in the digital PGA Superstore, so you have to be mindful of whether you want to spend the VC earned in-game on improving your player or making them look cool with new clothes, shoes, and clubs. Thankfully, buying cosmetic items is still clear, and you know what you are getting when you buy them, as there are no loot boxes with random items to buy.
The “story” of My Career also gets some added wrinkles. You can be challenged by pros to rivalries, where you try and beat them in a match-play format within the normal rounds. You have an agent who looks to set you up with sponsorship deals that gain you money, improvement items, and social media followers. After tournaments, there are options to do press conferences or media interviews, where outlets ask questions about how you did or what you are looking to improve on. Answering these questions will get you a reputation as bold, reserved, or composed, depending on how humble or braggadocious you are with these answers. Normally, in other sports games, these types of question and answer modes give you an option for what type of answer you want to give, but the little blurb option does not always give a clear idea of what the actual dialogue would be, so you choose what you path you think you want to take, but the actual answer is wildly different than what you were hoping. What 2K25 does really well is it shows you the actual response so you can see exactly what you will say when you select each option. This gives you greater control over how you want your player to be perceived, which enhances the overall role-playing element of this mode and should make for plenty of fun on repeated playthroughs.
Overall, PGA Tour 2K25 is another good entry in this series, one that looks better than ever, and has a more robust My Career than many other similar modes in other sports games. The changes made to controls are small, but the control provided over what happens is entirely up to you, and if you want to just hack away and still feel like a pro golfer, then the Perfect Swing option will delight and allow for relaxing gameplay with limited frustration. The additional courses mean more places to play, but the reduction in playable pros to use on those courses is frustrating. Even with its shortcomings, 2K25 is still the best golf game around. If you are looking to just pick up and play as all of your favorite golfers, than this entry will leave you wanting more, but if you like to tinker, as the options are plentiful across the various modes, or if you want to role-play what it would be like to play on the tour, this game does that very well and looks good doing it.
