

Meanwhile, while the cut scenes and score updates do their best to look like a golf broadcast, the commentary is awful enough to completely undermine that effort.

Your character is built from way too few options (all boring), and while their swinging action is smooth enough, their walking gait is the same awkwardly stiff and stilted movement that seems to plague most of EA’s games, and their range of celebration and reaction emotions is tiny enough that you’ll have seen most of them by the end of your first weekend with the game. Those rays of light make judging curves… and even seeing the hole… an even bigger challenge.īut it’s simply not fun to play. The trees are imposing on either side of the fairway, and the lighting system makes putting at the wrong time of day all the more difficult. In the developer’s efforts to offer “broadcast quality realism”, PGA Tour’s 30 courses are meticulously rendered in EA’s Frostbite engine. There’s no excuse for EA to fail to support a few of the common (and preferred) ones out of the box. Sony’s baseball game has a half dozen different control options to suit every playstyle and then some. A more conventional and appropriate three-click system is coming, we’re promised but… well, I can’t review what isn’t in there. However, the reality is that the PlayStation’s analogue sticks are never accurate enough to make this control system truly enjoyable. In fairness, it does work better than in the 2K golf games. For all EA’s efforts to present the game as an authentic and realistic depiction of the sport, the development team has cut a lot of corners that completely shatter that suspension of disbelief.Īnother issue is EA’s decision to choose a stick-flick control method, and make it the only option (for now). Don’t worry, though, the person that I hit with the ball wasn’t even aware of it. The crowd, and my player, actually celebrated that shot. This would then typically give me an easier chip and approach shot to the green and hole than if I had tried to be precise, accidentally undercooked my shot and left myself with a 40-foot putt.Īnd then one time, off a badly mis-hit drive, I nailed some crowd member in the skull.
#When is ea sports pga tour 2019 coming out with a new game full
I knew full well that even if I overhit things badly, the ball would simply crash into the crowd and stop dead. When there was a crowd arrayed behind the green, I would actively swat the ball from the fairway as hard as I could. In fact, I quickly made that part of my tactics. They’ll hang off your every shot, of course, but they won’t move out of the way when you’ve hit a ball right at them. Meanwhile, another area where the game does not play realistically is with the crowd. The way the ball moves off the grass, sand, and rough in PGA Tour infuriates me, even when I’m at a score of -24 by the end of the fourth day of a tournament, because it simply doesn’t look right. I have no doubt that according to real-world physics, this is exactly what happens on real courses. Now, I have no doubt that this really is just my perception, and EA’s developers took special care to measure the different lengths of travel a ball would move on the green following a drive with a 1 wood, 3 iron or pitching wedge. It just rolls, and rolls, and rolls, seemingly unconcerned with physical laws like friction or the impact of gravity when something rolls up a hill. After you hit a ball, it looks like it’s skidding across ice once it lands on the fairway or green. PGA Tour is a good example of why this rule is often cited. The game cosplays as a “cinematic, broadcast-quality” effort to recreate golf’s aesthetics and drama, but as soon as you scratch below the superficial pristine presentation, it fails to be convincing.įor example, one of the great rules about creating “realistic” video games is that you sometimes need to fake reality because the player’s perception is that it should look different. There is a stilted soullessness about EA’s effort. Mind you, even if I could play 18 holes of unbroken golf, I still would recommend the cartoony, and yet vastly more enjoyable Easy Come, Easy Golf on the Nintendo Switch instead. EA, I have had a genuinely lousy time playing EA Sports PGA Tour. Having to re-log into a golf game every two or three holes because a server disconnection throws me out of the single-player modes is ruinous to the experience. To all the big AAA publishers out there: if you are going to insist on monitoring our play sessions for every second that we play your thing, make sure your servers are rock-solid.
