PGA Tour 2K25 review: Above par

PGA Tour 2K25 is the result of 2K taking its golf-sim rivalry with EA seriously. After the EA Sports PGA Tour series made a comeback in 2023 after being a decade away, HB Studios made the calculated move of taking two years to develop PGA Tour 2K25, as opposed to 2K’s other annualized releases like NBA 2K. While both EA and 2K have a license to develop PGA Tour games, EA snatched The Masters away while 2K signed a long-term, exclusive deal with Tiger Woods. Suffice it to say, points have been scored on both sides, and this title is 2K’s first response to its competitor. Fortunately, it has come out swinging hard.

Straight down the fairway

Effectively like its predecessor but with stronger graphics, PGA Tour 2K25 gets the fundamentals right and operates as you would expect a full-fledged golf simulation should. After you create a golfer using the improved character editor, it challenges you to a full MyCareer season of the PGA Tour, with 27 licensed courses that are built closely to their real-life counterparts. Winning tournaments boils down to making the right calculations and having the proper timing to execute shots without a mishit. As long as you can master the swing mechanics, be it with the control stick or the three-click swing, you can score a birdie or eagle on every hole.

Similar to Microsoft’s Forza series, the game gives you a smorgasbord of options for difficulty where every assist you turn off raises the amount of experience points your character receives. That said, the standard Pro and Pro AM difficulty settings are not that forgiving, making any shot that isn’t perfect on the downswing veer wildly left or right. It’s unexpectedly challenging but not impossible. Additionally, MyCareer provides many settings to adjust the difficulty of the AI opponents and the length of a tournament, all without impacting experience gain. This offers a lot of control on how fast you want to complete an event, whether it’s four full rounds, a single round, or just a few holes.

Despite a few minor flaws, the presentation hits more than it misses. The best aspect remains the commentary, with Luke Elvy, Rich Beem, Henni Koyack, and John McCarthy providing decent play-by-plays. The bulk of the graphics have been improved, particularly the character modeling and the scenic vistas, though if you look closer, the crowd could be animated better and the water textures are static. Some of the jump cuts are abrupt as well. More than a few times my character would sink a hard-won eagle putt, but the game would immediately transition to the next scene with barely any time for my character or the crowd to react.

Swinging into action

Outside of MyCareer, the game provides a limited but suitable number of modes. Most will flock to the seasonal online play called Ranked Tours, which challenges players to daily and weekly courses at fixed difficulty levels. Even if you don’t rank highly on the leaderboard, you’ll still receive rewards for participating. The fantastic course creator has also made a comeback, allowing you to design a course from scratch and publish it for other players to try. There’s also online ranked matchmaking and TopGolf, which is a short, fun mini-game.

However, online play heavily skews toward the swing stick for controls, with the three-click swing being relegated to fewer online tournaments and being cut out completely in ranked play. As someone who prefers the three-click swing, this feels like a glaring omission.

Seasonal shifts

As a PGA Tour season simulator, MyCareer is an up and down experience. The training mini-games and pre-tournament practice rounds are solid, providing temporary stat boosts for ranking high. Due to the sheer number of courses and mini-games, each new event feels fresh. While the tour doesn’t have The Masters, its replacement called The Legends Championship is a decent substitute.

Several other elements, though, need better follow-through. The mode adds a popularity meter to gauge your player’s renown and introduces interviews where your player can answer in a bold or reserved manner to gain a follower bonus. However, the interviews get tedious fast, and the popularity meter is not a great way to judge progress. About a third of the way into the season, my character reached max popularity and was already fielding questions about him being the G.O.A.T. when he had only won a single major.

Rivalries and sponsorships, which unlock as you progress through the season, could have better pacing too. Certain golfers, like Max Homa and Tiger Woods, will challenge your character and bet that they can score better than you in a particular tournament. If you win, though, the rivalry ends abruptly, making it very short-lived. It would have been better for rivalries to have multiple stages and perhaps include one-on-one duels. On the flipside, sponsorships take a very long time to complete. Even after playing MyCareer for over 30 hours, I have yet to reach the final tier for any sponsorship.

A plugged lie

Character progression is slow but intentionally so. Leveling up gives your golfer extra stat points, which costs in-game currency called VC to apply, and a handful of skill points to unlock special shots and make them easier to execute. Given the difficulty of pitch shots, the Flop and Super Flop were particularly useful, in addition to the Power Drive that adds distance off the tee. Each main skill tree has a locked ability, like the Power Drive, that only becomes available across all your characters when you have built a golfer from one of five archetypes up to a certain skill level. Thankfully, you have multiple slots for custom golfers, so you’ll be able to unlock these skills over the long haul.

Gaining VC isn’t too difficult to accumulate from normal play, and the game provides daily and weekly quests for extra rewards. Some of these quests, though, are awkwardly specific and restrictive, like asking you to use clubs from a certain brand when they are not even available for purchase in the shop. There’s also a skill tree that’s annoyingly locked behind the seasonal Clubhouse Pass.

Unfortunately, the new gamification for the clubs is not successful. Each type of equipment in the bag — driver, woods, hybrids, irons, wedges, putter, and ball — gains experience points as your character uses them. This unlocks slots where you can add fittings for extra bonuses, and once the experience bar fills completely, the club can be evolved using an Evo Tool for better bonuses, though that destroys all of its current fittings. The process is a convoluted mess. The effort to turn equipment into something out of Diablo feels overly forced and heavy-handed. And ironically, the system discourages you from purchasing new equipment from the store, because they start off at base level and there’s no way to transfer experience from one piece of equipment to another.

Getting closer to the pin

PGA Tour 2K25 places plenty of pressure on EA Sports PGA Tour to step up its game. The two-year hiatus has given 2K’s latest effort, with its solid gameplay and improved graphics, a slight edge over its rival. It’s disappointing that a couple of the new mechanics in MyCareer don’t go far enough, and the microtransaction shenanigans with the equipment and locked skill trees have been shoehorned in unnecessarily. Still, the game is sitting at the top of the leaderboard when it comes to golf sims and is looking back at EA to see if it can catch up or be left in the sand trap.

This review is based on a digital PC (Steam) copy provided by the publisher. PGA 2K25 releases on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S for February 28, 2025. It came out in early access on February 21, 2025.

Nick Tan

Contributing Editor

Once upon a time, Nick's parents confiscated his Super Nintendo because he was "playing it too much." He has secretly sworn revenge ever since. Nick is now a freelance writer for various video game sites. Powered by iced green tea, he typically plays RPGs of all kinds like Shin Megami Tensei, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout. In his spare time, he follows the latest season of Critical Role.