It is difficult to explain, but how you can have a Golf-simulation game that doesn’t feature St Andrews? That is like having an Indy Car game without the Indy 500, Nascar without the Brickyard 400 or its replacement, or even F1 without Monaco and/or Monza. I get that it isn’t featured in the current iteration of the tour but for a place that has played host to The Open 30 times, where golf has been played for 600 years (longer than some countries have existed), and a place that is nicknamed “the home of Golf,” you’d think it would actually be there. Instead, it’s buried under fan-created courses, which is like delving into a dumpster fire to save a moldy bit of pizza from three weeks ago.

I get the humor in being the one to review the latest Golf game, and how seriously I’m taking that lack of a proper non-American course, but the truth is I actually like Golf. Yes, you’re only supposed to admit that when you’ve lived for enough time to make a scrunched-up face at new-fangled technology, but it is true. I don’t think I could honestly withstand watching morning-to-night coverage of it by people who have more patience than Spring Break traffic on the I-95. Nonetheless, the way I swear at the balls, the flags, the bunkers, the wind, and everything else in the known universe when it goes wrong tells me I’m invested.

It is involuntary: When I’m putting 65 feet from the hole and sink a beautiful birdie or eagle with a gentle tap sending the ball sailing over the left to right of the green, there is nothing that will stop me from clenching my fist and punching the air around me. Then when you are only inches or a blade of grass or two from the hole, there will never be something to stop me from calling everyone and everything Mona Stangley. There is an emotion to every bit of Golf when playing it, and that is something I search for with every “sports simulation” title, a primal emotion that bubbles up from the joy of winning, success, and failure.

Sadly, there are other emotions that come with HB Studios’ PGA Tour 2K23 and they are not always pleasant ones. I think in fairness it is right to point out that what I’m reviewing comes from the experience of playing with the add-ons of the Tiger Woods Edition ($119.99), which includes a small amount of the virtual currency ($9.99), a Tiger Woods cosplay set (infidelity not included), Michael Jordan, a golden club pack, rare golf ball things, and a hockey stick putter. Now, most of that doesn’t affect the gameplay all that much, in fact, none of it does really. 

Ok, the three “rare tier golf ball sleeves” do because they up some stats for a short while that are genuinely so insignificant that I don’t realize when these rare tiered “fittings” improve the grips, the club heads, the shafts, and the balls. I also don’t notice when they stop working. Drip fed to you via leveling up and the Clubhouse Pass, these common, uncommon, rare, and so-on superficial leveled bits didn’t make me care about adding better numbers to my heads, shafts, balls, and grips on each club individually. Yet because it is there, it is prefaced with these rarity tiers. There are special colors for each, and all the other modern common garden predatory design features are there to hook someone.

Of course, like any system that is designed on rarity, there is a virtual currency (a modified € sign) that rings throughout the entirety of PGA Tour 2K23 on the follow-through of its initial swing. You can “deconstruct” these so-called fittings for what is legally called tuppence – these gold clubs don’t polish themselves. Otherwise, you can apply them to your heads, shafts, balls, and grips which comes at quite the price point in-game, €125-150 each for the top tiers and €25 for the common. I think it is worth noting at this point that for winning a tournament, leveling up, and generally playing a course early on, you’ll get between €150-250 in sponsorship or level-up money.

Fixing these fittings to your bag of balls and clubs is not the only place to spend your in-game virtual currency that you can buy with real-world cash. It would be lunacy in 2K’s world to make it just that superficial aspect that is harmed by this decision. Want to buy a Callaway hat? That’s €400. Same with some Adidas shoes with a banner in the same color as the ultra-rare fittings that provide no actual benefit to your golfer. It is just a named brand that is expensive and has the colors in the banner, therefore it is meant to psychologically get you into the mind that they do something. It is completely cosmetic.

What’s worse is that every bit of clothing is gendered, and while I initially thought I could get away with buying women’s clothes and dressing my bloke accordingly, that’s not the case. As a shaft owner, you can purchase women’s clothes in the Pro Shop for the very expensive €400-500 price tags, but you can’t wear them and you better hope you know that before you spend that virtual currency you’ve earned. You might think this virtual currency rant is going on a bit long, and you’d be right, but after only a handful of tournament wins in the career mode I’d racked up a tidy $9.7-million. What can you spend that on? Nothing, it doesn’t actually exist in this mad world.

With a quick round-up of numbers I can say that with the virtual currency from the Tiger Woods Edition (€1,388), and about €2,500 in a few hours of play early on, you could buy two or maybe three outfits. That is where I simply can’t comprehend why this currency is here. It is too stingy to reasonably be used for both the fittings and the purchase of cosmetics like clothes, clubs, balls, and accessories. Once you’ve gone past levels 12-14, it becomes more and more difficult to level up and thus gain the currency that allows you to buy these cosmetic pieces of plain-colored or branded bits of digital fabrics. This makes the little voice in the back of your head begin to shout “it is just a couple of clicks away.”

The only thing worse than the intentional nagging from that method of pushing players towards microtransactions is the always-online DRM built into PGA Tour 2K23. If you are playing through the career mode and (for example) have a sudden drop from your ISP’s service due to maintenance, you can’t continue the mode that is single-player by design. During that time you’re forced into an offline mode which doesn’t allow you (obviously) to access online features. However, during that time you’re unable to earn XP or rewards, and thus you can’t play the “MyCAREER” mode. Sure, you can play the “casual” matches locally or even play “TopGolf,” but why the career mode and player leveling are tied so much to the online features is baffling.

I enjoy playing Golf games and that’s inherently what PGA Tour 2K23 is. It is difficult to screw up a game that is effectively pulling back the right analog stick and pushing it again, preferably as straight as possible. Though since I last played a Golf game, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 for the PS3 probably, the only main change is how to apply spin, fade, draw, and loft which is no longer a game of tapping A or X as quickly as possible while pushing in your desired direction. While setting up your shot and looking down the preview (Y), you’ll hold LB and use each analog stick to apply your desired effect on the ball.

Depending on your difficulty preferences, the swinging can become incrementally complex, conditional on timing and making the sweet spot for your desired power gradually smaller as you ascend the levels to pro-am, pro, master, and legend. I do enjoy the vast number of options available to make swinging more difficult, but ultimately you’ll find what works best for you and never touch it again. The option that is more likely to affect gameplay is the quality of the AI, on a scale of never played Golf to “Oh Tiger Woods can actually still play a round of Golf,” you’ll be wiped from bunker to bunker.

The course creation tool, (during my first time using it) is friendly enough to set up strange and interesting mixtures of settings and styled courses. Starting out with a menu of slider options to decide how many Par 3s, 4s, and 5s you’ll create (no M*A*S*H* Par 25s), as well as how hilly, tree-y, and water-y your autumn marshland of 90% Par 5s is, eventually your course is generated. From there you can go in with a more complex set of tools that I can’t help but feel would have made a younger me very excited. Now I’m what is jokingly referred to as an adult, so I don’t have the time for this.

Overall the gameplay from the last 15 or so years is still there, and it is still as enjoyable to get an eagle, albatross, and a birdie on any course. Though I’d be remiss to say I haven’t had hiccups showcase themselves with an increasingly more annoying presence. For one reason or another on the Xbox One, PGA Tour 2K23 would stop once or twice while loading a replay or calculating what to do next once a tee shot hit the fairway. Over the ten times this happened, in what I’d guess is double the number of hours, this meant rebooting the game. Autosaves are often a godsend in that case, but it is no less annoying to know PGA Tour 2K23 was still running but there seemed to be some code tripping over itself.

My biggest complaints, as is evident throughout this review, are the virtual currency and the lack of non-American courses. You have two courses that are not from the US, and then you have to go through the mire of self-regulated player-created courses. As much as there are people who will spend hours creating faithful recreations they don’t add up in quality to the officially created counterparts. I wouldn’t mind the VC if it were tied exclusively to the fittings of clubs, allowing for the prize money from tournaments to pay for clothes, but that isn’t the case because then it wouldn’t stretch the currency thin as that is the design memo.

I’d have also liked the sponsorships in the career mode to actually mean something, instead, they are partnerships you don’t have to do much with as long as you win. There is no complexity to it: You don’t get shouted at for wearing the wrong clothes/using the wrong equipment, so really it isn’t a sponsorship. The point of a sponsorship is to be seen using/wearing X or Y products from a company and in this Spencer Tracy-led production that isn’t the case, so I don’t understand the point of it. It isn’t an extra challenge, it is little more than admin to do before playing a couple more rounds.

Ultimately, I can’t fault HB Studios’ latest iteration of the PGA Tour 2K series when it comes to gameplay. It is still as fist-clenchingly fun and infuriating at the same time as ever. Nonetheless, the push for modified € signed virtual currency everywhere with levels that will progressively make it more and more difficult for players to obtain said currency through gameplay, will become incessant eventually. At that point, you might as well give up the game and go play actual golf at your local course.

An Xbox One review copy of PGA Tour 2K23 Tiger Woods Edition was provided by 2K Sports for the purposes of this review.

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PGA Tour 2K23

$59.99 - $119.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• The same decent Golf game we've had for years with minor changes.
• A wealth of difficulty options in various ways.

Cons

• Another set of system ruined with a virtual currency.
• Not exactly graphically impressive or grealy pleasing on Xbox One.
• Quite a few crashes/bugs throughout.