PGA Tour 2K25 is the first game in the series in two years. My time with it has felt as thoroughly whelming as I can remember while doing a review. Featuring decent physics, occasionally decent graphics, decent commentary, and decent variety, it is definitely a game. I ran into some insane crashing issues tied to the Xbox UI that may or may not affect you, as well. Let’s dig into the little bit of good, lots of mediocre, and occasionally bad parts of this game.
Golf
The sport of Golf is in an odd place, with the PGA and LIV organizations in a constant “will they? Won’t they?” merger negotiation. 2K swooped in a few years ago to grab the PGA rights from EA, and have put out a couple of OK titles. 2K25 continues that tradition with a competent, if boring version.
You have a large number of courses, including the return of player-created variants. The golfer selection is miniscule, with barely a handful of real-world athletes on hand. Tiger Woods is the main attraction, with Chris McDonald of Happy Gilmore fame making an appearance.
One of the bigger new features in the series is the availability of the Major Tournaments. It’s kinda nuts to think they weren’t in before, but you can play them now. Also, for some reason, you get PGA Tour 2K23 included when you buy this title.
Thunk
Golf is one of the more devilishly tricky sports to make feel right in video game form. Full-on simulations are nearly impossible to finish a hole on while making things too arcadey swings the difficulty in the opposite direction. 2K25’s default mode is definitely on the arcade side of things. You can set your preferred swing style, I stuck with the right analog stick method, and let the game aim for you.
Pressing the Y button will zoom you to your current aim location, and if you want a quick play through 18 holes you can finish an entire course in 20 minutes while staying under par. Bumping the difficulty up meant each hole could take that long on its own. When using my created character on the higher difficulties it felt nearly impossible to sink any putt more than 5 feet.
Modes
Front and center at all times is MyPlayer. The game wants you to focus on your player and (hopefully) spend money to level him up. There was a patch just before launch that greatly increased the rewards you get from completing quests. Before that patch, it would have taken an unbelievable amount of grinding to hit 99 overall.
As is you can buy gear, or just straight up use your VC coins to level your character when the ability points are available. At this point, it’s normal for the publisher and while I’m not a fan I still had fun without engaging with the system.
There are multiple online modes, including TopGolf. I got into a couple of matches and things ran well enough. It was hard to find them during the review period. Server stability and latency were solid, though things tend to be before a full launch.
You can hold tournaments, quick play, and pass the controller around for local multiplayer. Much like every other part of the game it ticks all of the standard boxes without every feeling unique. I wasn’t great with the course creator on a controller. It required a bit more patience and fine-tuning than I could normally stand.
Not Pretty
PGA Tour 2K25 is an ugly title. If you told me this game was released during the early Xbox One era I would believe it. There are performance and quality modes featuring 60 and 30 fps. The performance mode is so mobile game-looking that I gave in and played on quality. Even there the game’s courses look terrible. Grass density, texture quality, it’s all a bit shocking, like how the game is running on Unity.
The crowd is low in both density and graphical fidelity. Tiger Woods had the most work put into his model by far, as well. My created character, modeled after Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, was decently ugly based on how I maxed out every single slider on hand.
There is a single person for the majority of your play-by-play and he’s talking directly to you. I found it off-putting over time that it wasn’t mimicking a TV broadcast. Instead, this was my very own voice, speaking to me as I golfed. Like if a caddy had an earpiece and was full of over-the-top praise or derision based on my shots.
Finally, I had the game crash on me about 50 times during my review period. According to PR, this wasn’t an issue anyone else was having. It seemed whenever any part of the Xbox UI was used the game would immediately freeze. It would also crash outside of these situations but it was mostly during UI use. It happened on multiple Xboxes in my home and both off and online. Whether this is a pervasive issue on the platform will remain to be seen.
Wrapping Things Up
PGA Tour 2K25 is a golf video game. It is neither offensive nor special in any way. It can be shockingly expensive vs. the amount of content on offer, starting at $70 and going all the way up to $120. If you haven’t played a round of videogame golf in a long time it may be worth a go if you can split the cost with some friends. Outside of that, and especially if the crashing issues are happening, it’s tough to recommend.
PGA Tour 2K25
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
CONS
- Bland/Ugly
- Crash Prone
- Roster Size
