PGA Tour 2K25 Review – Review
Nearly a birdie until a mandatory online connection doubled the score.
When I reviewed PGA Tour 2K21 on Switch back in 2020, I kicked off that review by saying “When there is a famine, you might be accepting of even a meager feast.” I don’t think the Switch 2 has reached sports famine yet, but the general sentiment can be used to summarize my thoughts of 2K Sports’ long-awaited return to the world of Nintendo with the Switch 2 launch of PGA Tour 2K25. When it doesn’t chug or crash, this is a smooth, delightful golf game easy to sink into. It’s like looking into a mirror image of PGA Tour 2K21 on Switch. I finished off that opening paragraph more than five years ago with “Unfortunately, the Switch port is littered with visual bugs, sluggish menus, and the occasional crash. While PGA Tour 2K21 is one of the best golf games I’ve ever played, the execution on Switch is rough around the edges.” There’s a solid chance I could do a find/replace on that old review and it might work totally fine.
In the early hours of PGA Tour 2K25, I didn’t think I’d be able to write the review. I just functionally couldn’t play the game. It crashed close to 10 times on me as I tried to create a character. As near as I can figure, the current state of the game requires you to play a form of Russian roulette with the software if you want to create your own monster of a golfer. My tank top-wearing buffoon is what survived the crashing onslaught. As it stands, the crashing issues have seemingly entirely been within the character creator. Knock on wood and all, but I haven’t had an issue outside of that part of the game.
Outside of the crashing, the game largely looks great on Switch 2. The courses are detailed. Unlike the Switch 1 PGA Tour 2K release, crowds are featured when appropriate. Outside of the occasional hitch or slowdown during non-gameplay moments, this is fine. In handheld mode, I would regularly lose my ball on the screen in the aftermath of my shots. While that’s true to life in how easy it is to lose a little white ball in a sea of green, it’s annoying to basically stare at a sea of green on the Switch 2.
The feel of golfing in this is incredible, especially as it leverages some of the novel rumble of the Switch controllers. While you can do the old 3-click swinging of classic golf video games, I gravitated towards the mode where you flick the right stick down and up to mimic the swing of a club. The tutorials in the game help to mitigate some of the initial complexity. Within moments, I knew exactly how to add various spin and English to the ball as I launched tee shots, readied my approach, and tried to sink some long putts.
The MyCareer mode is where I’ve spent the bulk of my time and it’s been built up over the last few years to be more than just a string of tournaments jammed together. You have corny interviews you can participate in as well as the occasional training challenge to vary up the proceedings. The tournaments you play in to progress your career also have more flexibility in length. You can play every single hole or take part in Dynamic Rounds that sim parts of the rounds or the Interactive Simulation where you can hop in and play at any point.
Your created character can level up and progress as you play, but the part that was more engaging to me was building out my golf bag with different upgraded clubs. You can unlock different clubs and also level those clubs up, providing an opportunity to insert a boost into them to increase various aspects like drive length and precision.
Online is available in terms of leaderboards and online play (crossplatform, though reminder this came out a year ago on other platforms). There’s a whole Ranked Tour mode with various seasonal events, too. Unfortunately, online connectivity is a huge part of the game and becomes a barrier to any players not eternally connected to the internet. When you aren’t online, you can only play the basic exhibition mode and toy around with the novel course creator, making the game functionally barebones offline (you can’t even see your custom character). This is a major problem for any Switch 2 player that wants to play their hybrid system portably outside of their home. You will likely never be able to meaningfully play this game on an airplane. To a degree, I understand why the game is like this (every mode has some tie to online, including everything with your created character), but it feels like a gross oversight to not account for a meaningful offline experience on the hybrid console that often travels with you. The only saving grace is that, in my experience, when I removed an active game from the internet, it did a real good job of saving my progress mid-round.
PGA Tour 2K25 is a fantastic golf game, possibly the best feeling and most realistic golf game I’ve ever played. On Switch 2, it has so many compromises though and I can earnestly only recommend this game to a specific type of player: the Switch 2 gamer who doesn’t own another platform and never leaves their house. It has frustrating technical issues and is little more than a crappy demo when you’re not connected online. It’s impressive to see PGA Tour 2K25 run well on a Switch 2, but you’re better off golfing with this game on a platform it was actually designed for.
