Phenixx Gaming

Between the 2K PGA Tour games, I think I’ve seen some of the best golfing available. It is too bad that PGA Tour 2K25 (much like its prior titles) doesn’t include the G4D Tour. Nonetheless, 2K has returned two years on from the release of PGA Tour 2K23 with an updated, shinier, and slightly more 2K’d version of the golfing simulator. With a couple of additions, some for the better and some for the worse.

Now with The US Open, The Open (proper), and the PGA Cup, there are new courses and tournaments to slice up as you either become a PGA master or are just a Sunday golfer. The biggest portion of PGA Tour 2K25 this year is probably the main single-player mode, MyCareer. Like the NBA, WWE, and other titles of recent years, you start as an amateur making your way through the Q-School, or basically the qualifiers to join the PGA Tour itself.

This year adds in a bunch of sponsors to please, skills to increase over your career, and, of course, followers to gain as you become a legend of hitting balls with golf bats into small holes. Queen’s 1991 album aside, you have a meter measuring your personality as a golfer during interviews and other opportunities, as well as a measurement of your popularity. Win and generally be good, and you’ll get more followers, sponsorships, and interview opportunities. You also have a greater expansion on the difficulties of swings and generally how to play rounds.

However, for all the additions and expansions of difficulty options, there is also the troubling major publisher-ness of it all. First off, there is a requirement to always be online to play anything, including simple single-player options such as training or MyCareer. For some, this isn’t an issue, but for others, it is particularly annoying, especially when you’re on self-imposed deadlines and you need to download things while playing. It is a “small thing” but no less important later when it comes to servers shutting down.

Gameplay-wise, however, there is a greater depth to your swing, offering both the classic swing-stick mode and the more precise 3-click options. The former is the simple right-analog stick back and forward motion, and the latter is a simple click and hold, release, and click twice. I’d argue that the second of the two options is more mouse-friendly on a PC. With that, you also have the difficulty options of your swing itself, the latter difficulty adding in a fourth element rhythm to your swing, making it more difficult (obviously) to get the perfect shot.

There is a bit more control overall to how you play, with HB Studios adding refined drop shots and different ways of hitting the ball from the tee. It does make for a better overall experience, but realistically, unless you’ve been aiming at the big blue wet thing or people in the stands, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference in the drop shots. The abilities unlocked through your MyPlayer RPG system allow you to hit balls into the wind, but for the love of all that’s Tiger Woods, I couldn’t bring up the wind indicator to save myself.

Be it a clumsy bit of controls or something else, the PS5 controller asks you to press the touchpad to bring up the wind indicator. This also happens to bring up the Help menu of buttons, showing you it is Triangle to preview the shot and so on. So saying that I cared for the wind or any of the conditions would be a lie; the wind could be hitting me in the face, and I wouldn’t know it. It doesn’t make things too difficult, but if you’re playing while it is raining sideways, then it might help to have that piece of UI on the screen.

If you want a more casual experience, there are options to make PGA Tour 2K25 as “casual” friendly as possible, removing rhythm requirements and perfect precision. You might still not hit it straight with the wind carrying you every day, but there is a bit more to guide you if that’s what you want. That said, I did get “frustrated,” to put it lightly, when playing the MyCareer mode and opting to change from playing two rounds per weekend to the full four. Don’t worry, this will make sense in a second after talking about casual-friendly guardrails to keep someone from messing up too much.

Turns out that for whatever reason, when you opt to play the four rounds of a weekend’s tournament and set up everything to as much as you can to play all 18-holes for four rounds, you can’t (in my experience). Take out the apostrophe and change a letter, and you’ve got my “frustrated” language too. This year, in the settings for the MyCareer presets, you can change “user sim difficulty,” AI player difficulty, the conditions, the rounds, round lengths, holes to play, and what happens to unplayed holes. You see, in “round length,” you can select between the full round (18 holes), nine, six, five, four, and “dynamic.”

Dynamic basically skips some holes and lets you play a select few for the round as determined by the game. Selecting full rounds with four days played per event (for some ungodly reason) just picks willy-nilly which holes to play and sims the rest… The very thing you don’t want when you use those settings. Can you see why I was a little bit frustrated and angry? If you sit down to play a golf game and you set up to play the full weekend of the given event, you would think you want to play that whole event, no?

What sort of annoys me about this is the whole thing I’ve said before about 2K, about EA, Activision, and about most big publishers that add live-service models and these gameplay skips often unnecessarily. I get it. Some people don’t like certain holes (we’ll giggle and move on), but there is an option to skip a hole in the pause menu. Being always-online; the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and season-based quests to get rewards; the virtual currency that is part of every aspect; and this skipping sections of the round despite me saying otherwise. It all smacks of a big publisher CEO saying, “We are probably […] undermonetising on a per-user basis.”

That’s the problem with PGA Tour 2K25. Despite the fact that it is still the same golfing experience enjoyable for those of us lazy enough not to buy the clubs and go for the walk, there is this hostile nature towards the player. It’s as if someone is asking “Why are you playing when you could skip to the end already?” Maybe because I want to play the game. Maybe because I am criminally insane enough to have this want to hit golden balls with shiny “uncommon” golf bats while listening to a podcast or twelve.

Deciding the holes to play isn’t the experience I chose, nor is it the one I want that will force me into buying cosmetics such as a golden shaft, a sticky grip, and balls that are full of potential. Strip away the number grinding bit, and you’ve still got a decent golf game from HB Studios to the best of their abilities. Sure, commentary lines repeat like bad Tex-Mex, but turn that down, tell the replays to jump in a fire, and play several tournaments while listening to a podcast or music. If you do that, you’ve got a solid experience that’s slow because VC is used to level up.

Under said hostility towards the player for daring to want to play the golf game they bought (or are reviewing), there is a golf game in there. PGA Tour 2K25 maybe isn’t PGA Tour 2004 or 2011-2014, but if you can force yourself past the major publisher bits of it, there is a single-player experience that is otherwise largely unchanged. So what does that mean? Despite complaining about this largely as a part of 2K23 as well, I think it was at least a little more “subtle” about wanting to kidnap your wallet. That might be a harsh way of putting it, but it is true.

Oddly enough, as part of the super-sexy Legend edition that gets you 1800 VC, 5 level-up tokens, and a bunch of other things, you also apparently get the standard edition of PGA Tour 2K23, too. This transitions into a more technical aspect of PGA Tour 2K25, which isn’t perfect. The reason I bring this up is that despite having that rather expensive edition, the activation of the “You’re not a povo, you can have 1800 VC and other stuff” thing didn’t show up until 15+ hours into playing. So, I’ve seen both sides of leveling up a player.

Aside from leveling up being slower (obviously), I’m here to talk about the performance now. Which is fine, kind of. With every graphical preset set to as high as they’ll go, I don’t think PGA Tour 2K25 is going to make your custom-built PC from 2023 struggle unless you’re doing stupid things like 8K HDR. That said, coming out of pre-shot animations and loading screens, there might be a small frame-rate dip to the high 30s for half a second, probably due to online connectivity. Where the performance takes a hit is when it is trying to load a few things.

There would be times during a pre-event practice session or following a round in an event where everything would just stop. It did not crash as much as it froze but kept PGA Tour 2K25’s audio going. A quick Alt + F4 and rebooting the game does the trick, but I’d have more than two nickels for every time it happened. I still wouldn’t have enough to buy the VC, not that I would, but it did happen enough to recount it happening in the first place.

Honestly, I don’t hate PGA Tour 2K25; in fact I like it more than it likes me. Ultimately, that’s the problem though: its contentious nature towards anyone not willing to spend $120 on the Legend Edition and then $99.99 on 16,000 VC to complete the live service model is tiring. Yes, you can play without buying more than the Legend Edition gives you, but it is going to be a lesser experience. Additionally, there are parts of the game that try to push you in that direction. Much like the personality system and the always-online requirements, there are parts of PGA Tour 2K25 that feel disconnected from what people want: a golf game to play without distractions.

A PC review copy of PGA Tour 2K25 Legend Edition was provided by 2K for this review.

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$69.99 - $119.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• A solid golf game under it all.
• A solid MyCareer to sink your teeth into.

Cons

• Microtransactions crowding up gameplay spaces.
• Always-online requirements for singleplayer.