Electronic Arts are back again with the latest installment to the PGA series that dates back to 1997 with their first title, PGA Tour Pro, and this year is the first year since 1998 that PGA has not had an athlete’s name involved in the title. This year, EA SPORTS PGA TOUR has been made bigger and better than the previous title back in 2015, boasting 30 courses from release and featuring some awesome new game modes that we will dive further into.

There are nine different sections involved in Quick Plays which keep the options endless. Quick Play is for when you want to slam the ball down to the green and have a little more fun, all without needing anything put against you like in the Career mode. The game modes in quick play are as follows; Stroke Play, Match Plays, Skins, Best Ball, Four Ball, Team Ball, Alternate Shot, Foursomes, and Team Alternative. All of the game modes are good fun and take away from the seriousness of the Career mode.

There are three different championships you can start from in the Career mode to become the professional golfer you want your created golfer to become. When you launch the Career mode, you are prompted to create your golfer, which the creation menu, has now become more advanced than ever, being able to make your golfer look so realistic it’s not even funny. Once the character creation is finished, you are prompted with three Championships, the first being the Amateur Championship, followed by the Korn Ferry Championship and the PGA Championship, and these have challenges built into them called “Sponsor Challenges”. Being the noob I am at golf, I started from the Amateur Championship and worked my way up the ranks in the PGA world.

Do you think you are better than the rest? Competitive mode has been designed for you. You can compete against the world’s best in a variety of game modes around iconic golf courses. The game mode has 16 players simultaneously playing with worldwide leaderboards, so if you want to create a name for yourself online, you need to push hard into this game mode.

Skill-based matchmaking is working at its finest with the Social Game mode, where you’re put into a match with someone around the same skill level as you, which in my experience, seemed to have worked fantastically. The only downside was that I kept getting beaten. I’m positive my ball had a magnetic attraction to the sand bunkers. It’s a chilled environment with it being unranked. It’s like the title suggests – a social and fun time.

The tournament’s game mode was something I was interested in jumping into as it’s a global leaderboard but with limited-time challenges: Daily, Weekly, and Seasonal, so once done, they’re done. The tournaments in this game mode were good fun, but you’re not going to see the name WhippyXD on the leaderboard anytime soon. There are some G.O.A.T players out there.

The Pure Strike system has been put into this year’s title, letting players feel like professionals with the swings looking fluid to the gameplay and not clunky like before, and the controls felt polished, taking full advantage of the joysticks to put that ball where you want it exactly. Some of the controls took a little while to get used to when it came to the fine-tuning part of the game, such as putting that ball precisely where I wanted it, but I got used to this quickly.

EA SPORTS PGA TOUR is powered by EA Frostbite Engine, so the 30 courses look even better than you’ve seen before, and they’re the most realistic I’ve ever seen in a golf game to date. Character models looked visually stunning, right down to the champions you can play as or the character you create.

The game also ran smoothly and looked so crisp on the Xbox Series S/X. Each of the 30 courses has been packed with content to make them look better than ever before, and EA has expertly utilized the power of the Frostbite Engine. The sounds in this title had me immersed from the get-go, from the cut-scenes in the Career mode down to actually hitting the ball on the green. The crowd will show their respect whilst hitting the ball, but once you hit it, the crowd goes wild, which felt like you are actually watching it on TV.

The commentary was done so well and I’ve seen this in more and more sports games, bringing in commentary-based voice acting that feels more real, without the old feeling of it being pre-recorded. Sure, it’s still recorded, but it feels like it’s life.

EA has not held back with this year’s title and I can’t wait to see what the future brings for this franchise. The game looks absolutely stunning and the gameplay is top-tier. It will be hard to beat this title this year if you are a golf lover don’t miss this.

Written by: Hayden Nelson