EA Sports PGA Tour has strong sim credentials, but is also undeniably a first-gen sports title

It’s in the game. The slogan of EA Sports is one of gaming’s most enduring marketing ticks - though for EA Sports PGA Tour, perhaps something else would be more appropriate. “Game On”, perhaps?

I say that not because of anything that is - excuse the phrase - in the game, but because of the context around the release of EA’s new golf game. The reasoning and decision-making is complicated, but the short version is much simpler: EA stopped making golf games. 2K started making them instead. And now EA is back on the block to take the fight to the upstart, PGA Tour 2K. But this isn’t as simple as a return of the king moment; EA is basically starting from scratch.

That fact is the main caveat in EA Sports PGA Tour, in fact. You can tell this is a first run out - a new franchise, a hard reboot, rather than picking up anywhere near where 2015’s Rory McIlroy PGA Tours left off. That puts some tight constraints on what this title can accomplish - but it’s a huge positive in other areas, too.

Take the game’s 30 courses, for instance. Each has been painstakingly scanned with Lidar technology - used in everything from archaeology to car proximity sensors - in a lengthy and expensive process. That combines with EA’s always-gorgeous Frostbite engine to produce some truly luscious courses.

A degree of the joy of golf is being out on the course on a nice day, for my money, and in this EA’s latest captures the sense of wonder a course can have on a good day well. The fact that the thirty courses are mostly ones it’s difficult or near-impossible for civilian plebs to play on is, of course, an added bonus.

Also scanned are players, but this is where the fresh start-up nature of things begins to rear its head. Rory and Tiger, previous faces of the EA franchise, are not in the game. Despite being coined as the ‘Road to the Masters’ game, neither is Jon Rahm, the current Masters champion. In most cases this is to do with 2K exclusively licensing those players - which ironically is giving our digital video game golf a whiff of the back-and-forth between the PGA Tour and the new Saudi-bankrolled LIV tournaments.

Probably the worst thing about the golfer representation in PGA Tour is the create-a-golfer system, which is rough and bare-bones. You’ll be lucky if you can make anything that actually resembles you beyond being broadly the right color. Once you’re in the career mode, there’s hooks to improve that golfer through a skill tree, experience points, and gear. It’s all familiar sports game stuff, but it all feels very surface-level, like a practice swing.

The heart of the game is the action on the course, though, and I do really like that. There’s a familiar-feeling but ultimately new default swing mechanic, plus a three-click swing that was patched in just recently. Each stroke considers the wind, the loft, backspin - all of those things. It’s a realistic simulation, and one that gets ugly and slippery on the green in a way that feels characteristically accurate to the real game - even if it’ll frustrate some.

At the same time, there’s some concessions to arcadey play that just don't feel in touch with the highly accurate vision of golf the game otherwise presents. Old Tiger Woods players will remember mashing a button during your backswing and when the ball is in mid-air in order to add extra spin and influence how the ball moves once it lands. This is completely unrealistic on the course unless you’re Obi-Wan Kenobi - and yet here it is, bedded into EA’s serious simulation. That feels like a hang-up from a bygone era.

By the same token, though, you feel compelled to use it. Part of that is because of how relentlessly crap your created golfer is at the start of their career - which combines with the unforgiving nature of the primary swing mechanic to make those early rounds sadistically brutal. As you gain EXP and improve your golfer, it makes the system more forgiving to less-than-ideal inputs - but that comes later, after hours of potential misery.

This sounds like a lot of complaining. And I suppose it is. But I can’t stress enough that I’m still enjoying my time with EA Sports’ first golf outing in the better part of a decade. The company seems dedicated to improving this game through patches and updates. And there’s the inevitability of a sequel down the line, where a strong on-course foundation can be tweaked and built upon.

In a sense, one might say that this tees up the future of EA’s golf franchise. To keep the excruciating analogy going, they’re still on the driving range - but the foundation is there to put them in good stead for when they hit the course for real, which will probably be with a much more fully-featured game next year. EA has already pushed a couple of strong patches, so this isn’t so say you should wait for a sequel. You just need to understand, going in, that this won’t be as feature-packed as the golf games you remember.

As a foundation, EA Sports PGA Tour’s simulation and gorgeous courses carry the day. More than anything, it’s exciting to have two rival golf games that’ll now be inspiring and driving each other. And with 2K also working on some sort of licensed NFL product, it’s a war that is likely to spill over onto other fronts. EA, 2K - game on. And for EA’s first rebuttal, PGA Tour is a strong attempt.