PGA Tour 2K21 Review

It’s hard to think about golf games without just immediately thinking about the dominant and long-standing era of Tiger Wood’s PGA Tour. It ran from 1998 all the way through the 2014 season before dropping Tiger from the cover and name. EA held the licensing deal with the PGA Tour right up until 2018 when the Tour and EA amicably parted ways, allowing a new studio to get its hands on golf’s prime real estate. The developer turned out to be HB Studios, who coincidentally are located here in my home province of Nova Scotia, Canada. Best known for their rugby and cricket games, they started producing The Golf Club series back in 2014 which has evolved to now become PGA Tour 2K21 this year.

The Golf Club has always leaned more toward the simulator end of the spectrum, bringing an almost mathematical approach to the golf swing and game. The big differentiators were the options to play your character right from Q School through to the Tour, and its powerful course creator and editor backed by procedural generation that was sharable online. It was considered by many to be the best option outside of EA’s never-ending franchise, and it had a solid following that allowed them to keep iterating every year. For The Golf Club 2019 and now 2K21, 2K picked up the publishing reigns and despite getting to the development party a bit late, 2K21 was born.

Creating a great golf game isn’t exactly easy. It’s already a relatively niche sport to begin with, and the translation of its real-world mechanics to a video game environment has been a challenge not easily taken on. What’s more, getting people invested and excited about golf when they maybe aren’t already fans is just as challenging if not more so. I’ve always felt that the game that checked the most boxes in terms of being widely appealing to players while still being a good golf game was somewhere between Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 to 2005. After that, there was such a focus on turning up the realism that it started to lose its balance – especially regarding the thinned-out content. Thankfully, though not perfect by any means, PGA Tour 2K21 is the best overall golfing experience available since those golden era days and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

If you’ve played any of The Golf Club series before now, you’re going to be very much accustomed to what’s being offered in 2K21 except now there are 15 licensed courses, 12 tour pros, and a whopping 17 equipment and apparel brands sprinkled on top. In all honesty, having played some of The Golf Club 2019, 2K21 feels like what 2019 was hoping to be but is now more realized thanks to the added time. You can choose to start your career in Q School and earn your PGA Tour card or skip all that and dive right into going head-to-head with the likes of Justin Thomas, Ian Poulter, and Jim Furyk. If you’re new to golf games or just want to be introduced more specifically to 2K21’s mechanics, there is a well-done and narrated tutorial that covers the basics and even the more advanced options available to you on the course. I would recommend going through it once as it doesn’t take much time, but it’ll go a long way in helping you avoid the frustrations of navigating an unfamiliar golf game interface.

The basic golf swing mechanic is simple enough, but the difficulty level you choose will dramatically change just how nuanced your swings can be and how much impact deviations in your swing will have. Generally speaking, you’ll be most focused on two things: your swing plane which is determined by a vertical bar within the swing meter, and your swing pace which is shown on a curved bar on top of the swing plane. How straightforward and backward you swing and the tempo in which you swing gives you the basis for how likely your ball is going to go where you were hoping it would. Lock in that plane and tempo and you’ll be able to rely far more on the various ways the game allows you to shape your shots for various situations like opening or closing your club face for more or less loft or a certain ball spin.

As you increase the game’s difficulty the sweet spot of the swing plane and tempo are narrowed, demanding more and more precision from you to achieve a good shot. In my experience, this is where 2K21 starts to falter. Once you increase the difficulty of the swinging past the default and start entering semi-pro or pro modes and beyond, the level of precision required makes any level of consistency nearly impossible. To be more specific, while the swing plane is less of an offender in this regard, the swing tempo is a complete mess. The difference in swing speed between slow, fast, or perfect tempo at the pro or higher difficulty levels is almost imperceptible. This results in you feeling like you’re essentially swinging at the exact same tempo but achieving wildly different results as far as the game is concerned. It makes it extraordinarily difficult to be able to turn the feedback the game provides into a learning point that lets you improve in time which is quite frustrating.

This frustration is most readily apparent when playing matchmaking multiplayer. When going toe to toe online in matchmaking you’ll be forced to use the game’s Pro difficulty settings for the swing, which during my time resulted in more than a few people rage quitting the lobby after several consecutive poor shots. These were often players that seemingly had a reasonable amount of single-player experience or had purchased the deluxe edition of the game given the gear they were using so it wasn’t necessarily just unskilled or newbie players getting upset. Thankfully, there is a phenomenal level of granularity in which you can set your preferred difficulty for your PGA Tour play which increases or decreases the experience multiplier depending on your chosen options. I would suggest leaving the swing difficulty alone and increasing the CPU skill level as well as the greens and weather conditions difficulty to be challenged but still be able to enjoy your time.

For a long time golf games used experience and skill points to let you improve your golfer’s various attributes which help determine their abilities outside of your general swing quality on the course. The Golf Club and now 2K21 takes a different approach in that the majority of your ability hinges on two things: the clubs in your bag, and your own skills with the swing system. Different clubs from different brands will provide different stats specific to that club, and so building out a bag that suits your play style is as easy as unlocking those you want and sliding them into your bag. The rest is quite literally up to you – your golfer’s skill level is your skill level. If you’re adept with your club selection, swing, and shot shaping, you’re going to be better on the course – there are no stats in the background fiddling around with your end result beyond that. I really appreciate this approach as it spends more time rewarding you as a player and less time rewarding your grinding for increases on a stat sheet.

One of the defining aspects of the golden age of PGA Tour games was the fun factor. Some of that was due to the challenging but accessible gameplay, but the commentary played a part, and of course, the ever-present heart-beat sound effect backed close shots. The Golf Club and PGA Tour 2K21 by extension, doesn’t quite achieve similar points of enjoyment for me and plays a lot more like ones and zeros if that makes sense. It feels more like it was made more scientifically than it was created with the passion and feel of the game of golf behind it. A similar comparison would be the methodologies behind Gran Turismo and Forza when creating an arcade simulation hybrid racing game. PGA Tour 2003 would be Forza, and 2K21 would be Gran Turismo. Both are great, both are fun, but for different reasons and for different people.

Perhaps the most impressive feature in PGA Tour 2K21 is the course designer and editor. HB Studios has had a fair chunk of time to refine this feature in their games and it certainly shows as I don’t think anything else on the market can match it. Backed by a powerful procedural generation engine, you can have a basic course up in running in very little time to share with others online. Dig a bit deeper and you’ll discover just how deep an editor they’ve managed to put together without it being too overwhelming. Everything from land deformation to butterfly placement is at your fingertips and I suspect there will be some very nice courses put together by the community with this tool.

I may have spent 5 hours on a single hole during my time with the editor, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun. If you’ve ever messed around with editors in games before you’ll be pleasantly surprised that even land deformation, while a bit janky, isn’t as bad as you’d expect. You can size up and down most objects at your discretion, and they’ve even thought ahead enough to have the items your selected theme uses to generate the base course at your disposal for those like me who don’t want to have non-canonical tree varieties in use. Courses are all able to be rated by those who play them, so you’ll have an easier time sorting out which courses you might want to try.

Golf isn’t exactly a blisteringly quick sport, nor is it exactly high-octane. As such, presentation quality in Golf games is one of the most important aspects for the player and deficiencies tend to be more obvious because they have more time to notice them. PGA Tour 2K21 does just enough to not come across as dated but in general the presentation is perhaps the weakest aspect of the game and likely where the most gains will be made should a 2K22 follow suit next year.

Graphically, 2K21 walks a fine line between current-generation standards and something out of a five-year-old title. Player models are universally awful, and while there’s always the expectation that customizable player characters will be a bit weaker due to their customizable nature, the tour pros look just as awful or worse. The courses themselves look good from a distance, but the only thing that tends to hold up from the perspective of the player is the grass which to be fair is very well done. Trees are mediocre to poor, the objects around the course are terrible, and the water looks like turbulent dark blue Kool-Aid regardless of wind conditions. The lighting is done well enough that it goes a long way in making the less impressive bits look more presentable at least, which is nice. It’s not the worst-looking golf game I’ve seen, but in 2020 I’m expecting a lot more given the nature of the genre. The sum of its graphical parts is greater than the individual shortcomings, however, and the end result is something that isn’t going to ruin your experience.

Is there anything more associated with golf than the commentary that comes with it? In my opinion, a golf game’s enjoyment in the long term is dramatically affected by how good the commentary is. It needs to either be catchy and entertaining enough not to annoy folks when it repeats itself only a few hours into the game, or it has to have enough depth to keep things fresh for a lot longer. In a perfect world, we could have both, but nobody has been brave enough (or stupid enough) to spend the development funds to make that happen. 2K21 follows The Golf Club’s lead in trying to provide organic-sounding commentary that’s topical within reason, and while that’s partially achieved it’s also completely botched with some of the most cringe-worthy commentary in a sports game I’ve heard in years.

On paper, it sounds like it should be a great commentary backing with Luke Elvy and Rich Beam leading the way, but sadly that’s not the case. I’m not sure if they let them off script a bit too much, had poor direction, or both, but the result is all the same. Rich in particular should have been reined in, and honestly, he’s the real crux of the commentary issues. Too often he rambles on which is supposed to sound natural, but it doesn’t, and he has more than a few lines that make you scratch your head like “This is all over it like a tropical disease.” I think they’re going in the right direction with the commentary, but they just need some more time to have it sound a bit less forced and maybe be a bit more decerning with what makes the final cut.

A nice touch that I enjoyed seeing in the presentation is the replay system which helps make tournament play feel more like a real television broadcast. Between your own shots, you’ll occasionally be shown a replay of another player somewhere else on the course. The vast majority of the time it was a player knocking down a shot from a greenside bunker, and I haven’t seen any replays of players botching shots yet, so having some more variety in these replays would be nice to see in the future. In regards to your own replays, you can go back at any time to any of your shots in the round to record them at your leisure, and the game prompts you to save particularly good shots at the press of a button if you’d like. I did run into one of the few bugs I experienced when using the replay system whereby after using it the game locked up trying to load in my live position but otherwise it’s a nice replay system for those who want to save their prized shots. Personally, I’ll save my par 4 hole-in-one for a while.

PGA Tour 2K21 is a fine golf game, and while different from what most would have grown up on with the Tiger Woods entries from EA, it's a competent and great starting point for HB Studios to build on. Sure, the UX/UI is a mixed bag of good and bad, there somehow isn’t a punch shot available as an option, the wind physics often make as much sense as Rich Beam’s commentary, and the players all look like someone blindly played with the Oblivion create a character sliders, but 2K21 does the genre justice. The course editor is incredibly powerful, the ability to make just about any aspect as easy or hard as you’d like is hugely appreciated, and the fact that it’s mostly up to you how well you play and not an arbitrary stat sheet is refreshing, to say the least. There’s undoubtedly room for improvement, but PGA Tour 2K21 proves the future of golf games is in good hands.