PGA Tour 2K23 Review – Gamereactor

It’s been just over two years since HB Studios released their first golf game having brought 2K on board. Many gamers feared that the 2K launch would lead to a microtransaction nightmare, but thankfully that was not the case with the PGA Tour 2K21. Unfortunately, the situation is different in the PGA Tour 2K23. The game is designed to give an advantage to anyone with deeper pockets, especially early in the game. Fortunately, the game also has some positive aspects.

The first is the new user interface for this version. It has been completely rebuilt for the better. The placement of some of the menu options is up for debate, but in general it makes sense. The menus in the PC version are just as responsive as the last version, except for the communities. These are incredibly slow and reminiscent of the console version of the previous game. On PlayStation 5, the menus are much faster than before and cause less frustration than before.

While PlayStation had some advantages in 2K21, the game feels more balanced between platforms this time around. The green grids don’t look any different than they did back then, and Xbox gamers have also reported that the swinging plane is easier to hit in 2K23, which is where they were at a disadvantage. There are still some tweaks that should ideally be made, but hopefully this can be fixed in a future patch.

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On the golf course, the game is fairly flawless. Everything looks a little better than its predecessor, in part because the level of difficulty makes getting a good shot so useful. Just like a good shot on the real golf course (we’re told…).

The graphics and sounds got some tweaks and improvements without being revolutionary in any way. The new commentators keep track as they give a lot of information about the real courses in amazing detail when we hear about it the first few times we play the course but then it gets a bit repetitive. We decided to put the commentators out in the middle of our second season in career mode, but we highly recommend turning them on for season one. The sounds of the golf club hitting the balls are better than ever and you can easily tell the difference between meeting a Cobra driver and a Mizuno driver just like in real life.

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Career mode also has some extras which we welcome with open arms. The ability to change some courses to other formal courses during the season makes playing multiple seasons less tedious as you don’t have to play the same courses over and over. Some leagues don’t offer changeable seats, but they are mostly big tournaments that you really want to play anyway.

But it’s not the career mode that makes this game. Since The Golf Club came back in 2014 and introduced course designer Greg Norman, the game has thrived largely in the community that created their own courses, and that continues to be a huge factor in 2K23. Several thousand courses have already been transferred from the previous game, and more and more transferred and new courses will come. This allows you to play new courses pretty much every day. Some are good, some are bad, some are great and some are just a meme, but mostly the community creates playable courses that you will enjoy.

HB Studios Golf Series has always been known as the best pure golf simulation series and it has always been the Canadian company’s desire for you as a player to grow by playing the game again and again. With the addition of attributes to various golf clubs, they’ve deviated a bit from the track with that philosophy in 2K21, and this time they’ve taken it even further. Adding attributes to each racket, ball and character makes it possible to create an even more unique experience depending on your playing style. This is where microtransactions come in.

The cost of adding attributes to golf clubs (virtual currency) is one thing, but you also need to open your virtual wallet to buy golf balls, which will greatly help you throughout the course. For example, you can buy golf ball attributes that make your ball fly in the air longer and roll shorter on the green. Hopefully these traits will be more balanced in the future, but for now there is a huge advantage on the golf course. VC capital can be earned by playing the game, but since golf balls are consumable items, you’ll need to buy new balls faster than you can earn currency if you want to stay competitive.

Fortunately, you don’t have to play at a competitive level to enjoy the PGA 2K23 Tour. There are ways to play from the simplest settings to the extreme. Depending on what you like the most. Golfing with friends is always fun and they have also introduced the new Top Golf mode.

Unfortunately, Top Golf mode is more of a gimmick than anything else. In real life, Top Golf is a “group game mode” where you often meet up with friends for a snack while achieving specific goals at different distances with many different playing modes. Unfortunately, there is only one mode in this game and it gets boring after a short time. At the time this review was made, there weren’t even any leaderboards for it. This was announced for the future, but for now we’re sticking with remembering our best score and comparing it to our friends. This situation had a lot of potential and we were really looking forward to it, which makes it so sad that it is so frustrating.

A very attractive part of the game that many fans of the popular Tiger Woods games will appreciate is the ability to play like a pro. You can play as one of 14 playable professionals including but not limited to Tiger Woods himself, Justin Thomas, Lexi Thompson, Brooke Henderson, Lydia Koe, Colin Morikawa, and Xander Shaveli. Through our natural 2K partnership with the NBA, we also have some basketball players like Michael Jordan and Steve Curry. Unfortunately, players like Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland are missing from this lineup, both as playable pros and as names on the leaderboards during a Career event. We wonder if we can expect anything across the board.

Another thing that many players have requested is the 3-click swing, for those who can’t swing an analog stick straight for various reasons. HB Studious has added a new way to perform the 3-click swing instead of the traditional method we know from previous golf games. It might seem easier to use, but we promise you’ll have a hard time getting used to it, and it takes just as much out of the player’s mind as the analog swing.

2K has shown us both with the NBA and WWE that they are great at character customization, but unfortunately the PGA series still lags behind in this area. You can unlock or buy a set of clothes, but changes to your base character are limited. For some strange reason we can’t even adjust our weight (!), only height. We’re really struggling to figure out why this customization is gone from the last game. The lack of options to customize our character the way we want them to make it even more difficult to develop a personal relationship with him, which we think could have done a lot to enjoy the game more.

The PGA Tour 2K23 is undoubtedly an improvement over the previous game. And we’ll honestly say that if you enjoy golf, it’s worth the investment. When it comes to rating this review it will be lower than the previous game but it is indeed a better game although disappointing in many areas where they could have done so much. And yes, microtransactions is important to us. As we quoted HB Studios’ recent game – this is the best golf out there, see you later.