Beautiful courses is all this game has going for it.
Sorry, but it’s true. It’s like the entire budget for the game was consumed by the course design team and all the fancy LIDAR course scanning to make these courses look stunningly beautiful. Kudos for that but the rest of the game is woefully undercooked.
Bugs, bugs everywhere: This is the big one since some of these bugs can absolutely break the ENTIRE career mode. Like many others, I am stuck in a loop where trying to go into the next round of my career freezes or crashes the game. There’s copious bugs with challenges and quests either not properly completing or not properly granting their rewards. There are random sound bugs where the ambient sound just cuts out entirely and doesn’t come back until it fixes itself, several holes later. The camera can get stuck in textures nearby the player such as TV platform stands and even rocks adjacent to the course (see screenshot example below). The camera issues also cause the swing meter to not be visible far too often. And, of course, there’s the bugged putting grids that are completely inaccurate.
How this game launched with SO many bugs is beyond my comprehension. It’s not as buggy as day one Cyberpunk 2077, mind you, but many of these are game breaking or bugs that fundamentally hamper core gameplay. Putting grids have been a standard in digital golf games since the Jurassic Era of Links 386 so it boggles the mind how EA got these so horribly wrong.
Inconsistent swings and ball physics: You can hit the exact same shot from the exact same tee and get wildly different results. Hitting a shot on a perfectly flat fairway with perfect timing and perfect strike can inexplicably send the ball slicing off into the distance. Conversely, you can completely bungle a strike yet the ball goes perfectly straight. When the ball lands, it takes all manner of strange bounces and rolls ridiculously far no matter the level of spin. I have never seen a ball roll through second cut and rough as much as they do in this game. And don’t get me started on the greens, all of which play very fast, like they’re made of concrete. It’s impossible to have any kind of touch in this game because as soon as the ball hits the grass it starts rolling away.
So much wasted time: Go to a new hole, get a PGA Tour flag, then a fly over, then a PGA Tour splash screen, then an animation of your player. THEN you can plan your shot. I’d say on each hole, I spend just as much time skipping animations as I do actually playing. It’s insane. Included in this are the over abundance of menus, which are sluggish and cumbersome to navigate and require players to go through too many of them just to do basic things.
Missing features: No driving range? No putting range/greens? Character creator is pathetically limited. Why do all shooters in an online match shoot simultaneously? I mean, I understand to a point but why is there no option in private matches to allow for turn based shooting like, you know, REAL golf?
I’ll leave it here but I could have added a whole lot of other rants including the choppy 30 fps performance, how online matches are a complete crap show, and so on and so on. After a 8 year hiatus since Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, I expected better from this game. Alas, it seems expecting a good experience is hoping for too much,
I seriously cannot recommend this game in its current state.
