I love a good round of digital golf. I mean, I really love it: I have a Golden Tee arcade machine in my house. I’ve got fond memories of EA’s Tiger Woods games being my comfort game as a teenager – something I’d hop onto when I needed to decompress. As an adult who has a set of real life golf clubs in the garage that goes woefully underused (life’s so busy that it’s hard to carve out a few hours to hit the links), I’m very aware that a golf game could fill a little gap in my life.
With a gap in my gaming schedule, I figured the recent release of PGA Tour 2K25 might be the one for me. I liked 2K’s foray into the world of golf sims well enough when it made its debut, so I decided to go with that over EA’s offering – to see how much had improved over the last several years. I fired up Steam and, feeling confident, dropped a not insignificant amount of cash on the Premium Edition that’d get me in early. Initially, I was thrilled.
Compared to my (admittedly a little distant) memory of the 2021 game, the 2025 offering from 2K has clearly been greatly refined. It’s slicker, it’s sleeker, and it’s cleaner and easier to understand and grapple with. I really particularly enjoy the assists system, which rather reminds me of those deployed in racing games like Forza Motorsport – it’s a clever solution to offering up a satisfying simulation experience and fun rapid-fire arcade gameplay in the same title.
Basically, playing an arcadey game that pretty closely resembles that golden era of PS2-era EA Tiger Woods games will offer your custom created career player 100% of Experience earned on each round of Golf. But the more features you flick off, the more EXP you’ll gain over and above that standard amount.
The racing comparison is apt. In Forza, I don’t really need the racing line, so I turn that off and get an EXP bonus. Here, I think I’m pretty apt at driving the ball, so I turn off assists that compensate for crosswinds and make the game more mechanically forgiving of scuffed swings. I’m an absolutely atrocious putter, however, so once I get to dancing on the green, I want all of the assists on.
With my various settings tweaked, I was set to earn 120% of the ‘standard’ EXP gain – and more experienced and skillful players than me will be able to earn a great deal more.
EXP is important, as it unlocks rewards, levels up your player, and helps you to gain the currency required to gain equipment and the like. But the breeziness of the game with a reasonable number of assists is appealing to me, especially when I know I can adjust settings for a more realistically punishing experience if I so wish.
This pairs nicely with how the career mode doesn’t by default force you to play every hole of a round – out of a full round, the default settings might ask you to pick up four or five holes, while an AI will simulate the rest. Again, it takes the pressure off – but if you want to play every hole by hand, that’s just a menu flick away. When you’re not on the course, there’s other distractions like training mini-games, press conferences, inter-player rivalries, and so on.
All of this speaks to what I liked about the older golf games – they’re sports simulations, but they’re also fun. Golf is a relatively accessible sport – you can borrow some clubs or buy some banged-up old ones and get on a course with some friends for not very much at all. The joy of golf in video games – to me, anyway – is to play at a higher level, simulate a career, and experience it as something more relaxing rather than a level of challenging so as to be stressful – which trust me, is how it works for me in real life.
And yet… an anchor sits around the neck of this contender. For all the lovely casual-or-hardcore golf action, an insidious streak runs right through PGA 2K25 – one that has only been emphasized by the first quietly-deployed update to the game.
You see, the evolution of your ‘myPLAYER’ – that is to say your custom-created golfing hero – is tied to spending currency that’s either earned in-game or, yes, purchased. Want some new clubs? That’s going to cost some VC. Clothes? VC. Want to level up your character’s golfing attributes? Hand over the damn VC!
This alone isn’t so unusual, obviously. Loads of games have you earning currency and then spending it to progress. What are experience points in RPGs if not this? Sure, selling that currency for real cash is a little scummy and arguably a shortcut to cheating – but whatever. But then 2K… oh, they push their luck.
When the PGA 2K25 entered its early access period, when the most dedicated fans played, it had one setup of the amount of VC that could be earned. Once the game hit final release, a subtle patch was quietly applied to the economy, essentially nerfing the quite reasonable rate of VC gain I saw pre-release to something much, much worse.
Rightfully angry folks on Reddit have been crunching the numbers, and suggest that the number of hours to reach level 99 with your player character has essentially risen from 92 hours – quite a lot, to be fair – to a whopping 214. The amount of VC it costs to level up or afford vital tools needed for progression has rocketed by as much as 60%. The initial progression wasn’t exactly rapid, but 2K clearly came to the conclusion that it also wasn’t slow enough to prompt enough additional spending. Thus the decision was made to pull a few greedy levers – not even waiting a few weeks, dashing to them at launch like Augustus Gloop to the chocolate river.
I wasn’t remotely clued into the PGA 2K community, but even my casual ass noticed the difference in my earnings before and after this change – which sent me to reddit, which in turn revealed the horrible truth. Steam reviews have become scathing. The word “greedy” pops up in those user reviews often, but the best word is probably this: “Predatory”. That it is. Here’s another word for you, and this one is from me: Disgusting. I’ve got some other words for the people behind this system, but they’re not fit to print. Use your imagination, yeah?
I was honestly really happy with PGA Tour 2K25 – but this has properly taken the wind out of the sails of my enjoyment. My only minor quibble with the game before – slow menu navigation with over-wrought transition screens and annoying pop-ups – is now dwarfed by a greedy cash grab of a character progression system. A system that feels like it belongs in a free-to-play mobile game, where competing online is inexorably tied to a grind hundreds of hours long or… y’know, opening your wallet again. When progressing now feels so much more painfully slow – and crucially, so properly geared towards extracting more cash from me in the form of microtransactions – I am emotionally checking out.
Bluntly, this sort of total bollocks can be argued for in a free-to-play gacha game, but this ain’t that. Some people have paid over a hundred pounds for this game. Even the standard edition is sixty quid. Bluntly, it’s a bad joke. And it undermines an otherwise lovely experience – arguably the best golf game I’ve played in a decade. Like me missing my fourth putt in a row for a double bogey after hitting the green in regulation, 2K has crafted something magical and ruined it at the last. What a shame.