It’s been a turbulent few months for the established world of golf, with an upstart tournament circuit flooded by shady money and motivations luring a few too many players away from the PGA Tour. As is often the case, the up-to-the-minute controversies of sports aren’t yet represented in video game form, and PGA Tour 2K23 is rolling up with barely a care in the world. Heck, it’s even starring Tiger Woods on the cover, celebrating his illustrious career and leaning on his continued popularity, as though he were still at the heights of his golfing powers.
Personally, what’s probably the biggest change is the addition of a triple-click swing, as an alternative to the analogue stick swinging that HB Studios first cooked up for The Golf Club. It’s a great addition to peel back the layers of complexity and variability that some more casual or less experienced golf game players might find intimidating.
Now, there’s a large circular meter in the bottom right corner of the screen that I feel can best be described as an exceptionally stressful clock. Once you’re happy with the angle, type and direction of your shot, you can hold the face button to set how accurate you are to your power selection, before then releasing and timing two successive taps as what I’m calling clock hands race around the circle.
The accuracy of your timing is pretty crucial through this. There’s a few rings in the middle of the circle for you to try and nail the power input, then there’s targets at the top and bottom to tap in time to for the top and bottom of your swing. Get them a little bit off and your shot might vary by a small amount, but get it very wrong, and that ball is going nowhere near where you wanted it to.
It’s up to you how challenging you want those success windows to be. A straight shot will have the loosest timing, but trying to hold back your power to bring a shot’s landing spot closer to you, adding fade, top or backspin, loft, they will all affect how easy it is to time. That’s in addition to the difficulty setting you choose for the game in general. Amateur generally feels nice and forgiving, while Legend difficulty has tap targets that might as well be a single pixel wide!
Even on the easier difficulty settings, this is still a golf game that can and will challenge you. You’ll want to be aware of the wind and other conditions, finely tune your approach shot to get the ball to land nicely on the green (and avoid sand bunkers that lie waiting to catch you out), and then there’s the completely different challenge of putting. For this there’s just a hold and single tap, but it’s so tricky to judge the power that you need, even with the game giving you a good guesstimate, and then to get the direction of your putt just right to navigate the humps, curves and inclines that are found between you and the hole.
There’s some especially challenging putting greens in this game, and that’s thanks in part to the real world. PGA Tour 2K23 adds to its golfing credentials by adding a bunch of additional real-world courses. There’s East Lake, the site of the year-ending finals that are running this week, and its’ joined by new courses like The Renaissance Club in Scotland, the South Course of Wilmington Country Club, and St. George’s Golf and Country Club. I played a full 18 holes on East Lake and the front 9 of Renaissance (making it stereotypically wet and windy for my outing), and both provide good challenges, though I’m not even a casual golf watcher to know how accurate they are. Of course, the course creator from previous HB Studios games is here as well, so there will be countless community creations joining them.
It no doubt comes with great satisfaction to 2K Games that their PGA Tour game series is returning before EA’s effort is able to arrive next year. We don’t know what EA’s game will look like, how it will play and how flexible it will be just yet, but HB Studios is continuing to build on the solid foundations of PGA Tour 2K21 and The Golf Club which came before it. The new triple-click swing is a fantastic addition to make this game feel more welcoming, but it’s safe to say it’s losing none of its edge as a challenging golf game for those that want it.
