EA Sports PGA Tour: Augusta and The Masters magic, but you need to practice

It’s the best practice position before 18-hole rounds with new surface and shot physics

• by
  
  Owen S. good
  

• on April 11, 2023, at 9:00 am

It’s been a decade since Augusta National Golf Course was in a video game, and eight years since we’ve seen St. Andrews on a console. Just going back to these places will be enough for most interested fans EA Sports PGA Tour — especially after John Rahm’s win at the Masters last weekend. But the game, now on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, plays a little differently. So they should consider taking some time to get to know them before gorging on the buffet of 30 “bucket list” destinations.

The best way to do this? Honestly, it’s a challenge mode. Golf really doesn’t need to be reduced to bite-size video game challenges — it is He is Small scale challenges, 18 of which make up a round. But it soon became a challenge EA Sports – a trademark of Electronic Arts PGA TourA signature feature for me, at least in the first week, is how it tells me what tasks these courses will anticipate later in my (very deep) career mode. I wasn’t prepared to appreciate or enjoy this live-action vehicle as much as I did, but in the absence of a training facility or video game tutorial, I was totally banking on it for, as they say, getting back into the swing of things.

Challenges take players to one of the game’s 30 courses and give them three tasks to complete, replicating some performance from real life – for example, Lexi Thompson recovering at the 2019 LPGA Championship or Francesco Molinari recovering after recovering at The Masters that same year. Each challenge awards three stars, and those stars award XP and bonus points, and collectively these two advance your created golfer or give them new skills and new cosmetics. (While the latter is unlocked via a prominent in-game shop menu, it’s important to note that nothing that affects a junior golfer’s play or improves their game can be purchased for their real money equivalent. That’s all cosmetics.)

You don’t have to complete all three commitments for a challenge in the same gameplay, either; This is what I meant about challenges that support repeated attempts. If a challenge is, for example, to make the green on all four holes (that is, to land on the green evenly minus two strokes) and to make birdie on two of them, you can focus on sticking to greens on one play and getting birdies on another.

This is not to say that the challenges are not difficult. It took a few hours to clean up the Thursday and Friday moments from this year’s Masters. Part of that was my unfamiliarity with this game’s controls after eight years since the last EA Sports golf game. Some of that, however, was also because the surfaces and lies of the ball are more true to life and thus more difficult to play – which has to be the point of the simulation, after all.

Green #15 at Augusta National – sorry to keep going back to this course, but I have a feeling a lot of people are playing it right now – is a real-life challenge notorious for the Tour pros. He’s definitely in the range for a shot at Vulture. In previous games, I never had to worry about running over that green or pushing a long recovery into a water hazard. Now I do, which makes the decision to lie down at 15, and take a shorter approach to the green, that much more meaningful. Now I know more about what Chip Peak had in mind In the 1993 Masters.

EA Sports PGA Tour ever lavishly illustrated; It’s the strongest feature yet of a golf simulator that takes a lot of play and replay to really understand. The best way to see the 30 spins on the disc is, once again, to play with the bite size that Challenges mode offers. For some courses, like Pebble Beach, Augusta, or TPC Sawgrass, I have a thing about waiting to play my first full round there so that it’s an event on the career calendar of the player I created. Of course, I want them to go that prepared, and not embarrass themselves, so these warm-ups are a nice way to keep this personal tradition intact while still bringing a talented virtual golfer to the tee.

Photo: EA Orlando/Electronic Arts

The features that serve the golfer are a bit uneven. While there are plenty of unlockable cosmetics and items (and more promised) to equip, the character creator itself is pretty strict. Different races and many ethnicities are represented, but don’t expect them to look too much like you, as the faces come from stock molds. This has been a longstanding weakness of EA Sports titles, especially compared to its contemporaries. However, in Career there is an opportunity to play in AI pairs, which, although time-consuming, is available to those who prefer full-fat sports experiences (like me). And for those who really want to plunge into an immersive career, you can start over as an amateur—including the newly created Augusta National (2019) Women’s Amateur. These are experiences that I look forward to recreating over the next dozens (if not 100) hours I can dedicate to the game.

For many, it is a selling point EA Sports PGA Tour is simply the ability to play these courses in a video game; It seems low-key, but to deliver it honestly takes a lot of effort, and the EA Sports developers still exceed my expectations. The broadcast presentation backing up these hits is crisp and alert, and it shines with little touches like walking over the Saracen Bridge on that 15th hole that gives me so much trouble. Returning players and new players alike should expect to spend plenty of time working on their game, before they can be confident taking on the likes of Pebble Beach or Whistling Straits. But this is an essential part of the challenge and the appeal of golf.

EA Sports PGA Tour The game launched on April 7 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a pre-release download code provided by Electronic Arts. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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