PGA Tour 2K25

11 years ago, when EA Sports released Tiger Woods PGA Tour 15, a pretty hardcore golf game called The Golf Club was suddenly released by unknown developer HB Studios. The Golf Club was a golf simulator and you really had to find your patience and your best golf game if you wanted to succeed. HB Studios has since then refined their games and since 2020, they are actually the ones behind the official PGA Tour golf games together with 2K.

PGA Tour 2K25 builds on the fine PGA Tour 2K23 (these golf games are released every two years), which never quite got off the ground. PGA Tour 2K25 is a significant improvement on the previous game and this time it includes three major official golf tournaments, namely The U.S. Open 2025 at Oakmont Country Club, the 153rd edition of The Open at Royal Portrush Golf Club, and not least the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow Club. In addition to the aforementioned courses and tournaments, there are plenty of other tournaments and more than 20 official golf courses in PGA Tour 2K25.

Probably the biggest news in PGA Tour 2K25 is the new EvoSwing mechanics alongside the Perfect Swing option, which I'll come back to in a moment. EvoSwing may sound like a fancy buzzword, but it's actually a new and more precise way of hitting. If you choose the swing method where you first pull one stick back and then push it forwards quickly to emulate a golf swing (you can also choose 3-click), you now have points in both your back swing and your forward swing that you can aim for. It sounds trite, but it works really well and helps make your shots more accurate.

At the same time, you can set more than 20 different parameters to customise your shots so that the difficulty level is exactly how you want it. For example, you can make use of the Perfect Swing difficulty level, which makes it even easier to aim by, for example, making the visual path of the golf ball through the air take into account the ground, wind, and much more - and if you prefer to take these into account yourself, you can switch them off. There are so many settings that benefit beginners and true golf enthusiasts alike - and Perfect Swing helps make this iteration of PGA Tour a much more accessible golf game than before.

When you start the game, you begin by creating your golfer in a highly detailed character editor and throughout the game you gain access to clothing, shoes, equipment, and accessories from 30 manufacturers such as Nike, Puma, Adidas, Ecco, TaylorMade, Skechers, Under Armor, and Tiger Woods' own new sports brand Sun Day Red. Your character can be upgraded throughout the game with different attributes and abilities, and the progression of your character, but also equipment and your Clubhouse Pass (we'll come back to that in a moment) evolves whether you play in the career section, play a mini-game, practice your shots, or build a course in the in-game course editor.

PGA Tour 2K25 also features a number of professional golfers, including the legend Tiger Woods, but also Max Homa, Matt Fitzpatrick, and a number of female players led by Brooke Henderson, Lydia Ko, and Rose Zhang. However, the focus is much more player-centred here, so you can't actually play with any of the professional players, only against them.

The heart of PGA Tour 2K25 is MyCareer, a very comprehensive career section that spans many events, often spread over several rounds on the PGA Tour. In this part, in addition to doing well on golf courses all over the world, you have to create your own career and take care of all your off-course commitments. It's important to have the right social media profile to gain as many followers as possible, you should take part in interviews to please the press and your fans, and you can write articles for golf magazines to show professionalism. Of course, you also have to take care of the sponsors and attend their events and, as mentioned, you have to constantly work towards becoming the greatest player on the PGA Tour and winning the coveted trophy.

PGA Tour 2K25 offers hours of fun, because in addition to the extensive MyCareer, you can participate in daily and weekly online events, play different types of golf with up to three friends, from Stroke Play and Skins to Four Ball and the entertaining 2v2 mode Scramble. Both online and locally, you can play Topgolf, which is a kind of mini-game against others where precision is the most important thing, you can participate in detailed training sessions to improve parts of your game and, as mentioned earlier, you can create your own courses that can be modelled down to the smallest detail, right down to where each tree or bench should be placed.

We've seen before that sports games from 2K can be packed with in-game purchases. It would be going too far to say that PGA Tour 2K25 is "packed with in-game purchases", but it's not completely off the hook. In each of the game's five scheduled seasons (each lasting 12 weeks) there will be a Clubhouse Pass. A Clubhouse Pass allows you to unlock new clothes, new golf balls, various other equipment, and perhaps most importantly, XP Boosts. As mentioned earlier, your progression takes place across all parts of the game, so the more you play, the more you unlock in the 100 Tiers that make up a Clubhouse Pass. However, there are certain things that are locked behind Clubhouse Pass Premium. You can buy one for around £8, which gives you access to all the things you unlock during the game. You can choose to ignore the Clubhouse Pass Premium completely, which means that you will have to work a little harder to reach the XP that Premium members can boost themselves to via the Clubhouse Pass Premium and there is some equipment, mainly cosmetics, that you can't seem to get your hands on without it.

Visually, PGA Tour 2K25 is quite nice, but nothing special. The courses are nice, the menus that you spend a lot of time in are easy to use and also quite intuitive, but there is a bit of "uncanny valley" over some of the players' faces. The visuals are certainly passable without being impressive. The soundtrack is fine, as you would expect from a golf game, and I actually think the commentators do a decent job. However, you sometimes notice that what they say doesn't quite match what's happening on the course, and sometimes they contradict each other a bit.

PGA Tour 2K25 is a really solid golf game, with many hours of gameplay, lots of content and, not least, a configurable difficulty level that allows almost everyone to join in - both beginners and hardcore golf enthusiasts. The huge MyCareer, which is the centrepiece of the game, will consume hours and hours of your time - but again, the game is so configurable that you can actually set this entire section to be "respectful of your time" as HB Studios has previously put it.

PGA Tour 2K25 is a great evolution of PGA Tour 2K23 and is perhaps the best golf game yours truly has played in a very long time. If, like us, you're not afraid to don an ugly golf outfit and sport your best manners, then you should definitely take a look at PGA Tour 2K25.