Jeff

EA is really going down hill lately. I can't believe how awful this game is, compared to past EA Sports PGA games. If you judge it by itself, it is pretty fun, with some annoying quirks. But if you are comparing it to something like EA Sports Tiger Woods 2004, then this game is absolute garbage! First, lets start with the graphics. How are they not better than this in 2024? I mean, the courses look beautiful, but the people are so robotic and fake, it's laughable! Even in older EA PGA games if your ball hit a bystander, there was an animation to show it hit them. Not in the newest release. Like hitting a soft tree. I can always get past sub-par graphics when they make up for it with incredible gameplay. However, that's not the case here. The gameplay feels like a high latency, disconnected experience, comparable to playing an online hosted game, not on your own hardware. Pulling back the joystick takes almost a full second to register on the screen. You hardly feel one with the virtual player, and really are getting the timing down only because you account for the lag, not because it's intuitive or accurate. Still on gameplay, it's very frustrating how you can hit a perfect shot (no overswing, perfect timing, and straight up and down) and still see it go far right or left. It's also very inconsistent which direction it will go. It would makes sense if overswing went left (on a right-handed golfer), and vice versa for under-swing . But they each seem random, with no consistency. I realize that one you master these kinds of games, they can be criticized for being too easy. I think I pretty regularly shot -18 on TW2004. But the answer to that it not to randomly reward perfect shots with a less than perfect result. Where's the competitiveness then? My final criticism is the announcers. They say the same thing over and over again throughout a round. I'd rather turn them off than listen to the five things they know how to say about a shot. And they're rarely accurate. I can hit a shot stiff to about 2 feet, and they'll say "nothing wrong with that, in the middle of the green". Or I hit it short and right, and they say "well, a bit long, a bit left, but safely on the green". It's just annoying! If it's a budget thing with getting big names to announce, then just use a random person that can record tons of different scenarios, then make sure you accurately assign each one to the appropriate situation. It is an okay game, that I actually enjoy playing, but it could be SOOO much better, and should be for the price to play. Especially considering that they've nearly had this game perfected for years, and seeing them move backwards is really disconcerting. It's like they took the old game, put it in a new engine that sucks, and let the fresh-out-of-college devs work on this one, since it isn't their A1 title. I'd rather them further polish one of the older games, sprucing up the graphics, while preserving the already-perfected gameplay. I will try the 2K competition until they get their heads back in the game!

I've played it over 100 hours, and really do enjoy it. There are a bunch of things I miss from CS1, but when going back and playing CS1, I miss things from CS2. While the game is very buggy, crashes pretty often, and is far from polished, it's still a lot of fun. I only hope that they prioritize fixing the bugs and adding things that are missing from CS1. Pros: - Roads... Building roads has never been more satisfying, and the mechanics are great! I love creating my own interchanges and elaborate roundabouts. Just wish I could save my templates, and not have to manually create them each time. - Graphics... Beautiful game! - Buildings... I'm in love with the skyscraper Residential and Office Buildings. - XP vs Population... While some may not like it, I prefer the XP method for unlocking things. Mainly because the game cripples my CPU when population hits 200k, so I often prefer to focus on spread out, smaller towns in my city. Cons: - Bug... Crashes far too often. Make sure to turn auto-save on. - Bug... Continue/Resume from launcher doesn't work. It just takes me in to the main menu, and I have to load a save. - Bug... Cloud Game Saves vanish. Fortunately, the one that vanished had an auto-save backup, since I was recently playing it, but extremely frustrating! - Traffic... Traffic might be dumber than in CS1. They wait until the last minute to get in the turn lane, then stop traffic to turn. They sometimes insist on getting in the turn lane in advance, but not gradually, and thus stopping traffic to do so. They don't take the path of least resistance, they take the shortest path, even if it causes problems. They should make a "Navigation (GPS) Satellite" in communications, that when placed would allow traffic to get smarter because they're using Google Maps. - Parks... There's hardly any parks and entertainment buildings to place. No more zoos, city parks, etc. - Industry... They've taken away control of industry. Yes, you can still have specialized industry, but it is not nearly as polished as in CS1. And since the warehouses have been stripped away, you have to rely on those that are in Cargo Transit. Even then, they don't seem to transfer a lot of my goods to their storage. I miss the industry from CS1. It was nearly perfect! - Simulation Speed... When you crank it up to 3x speed, it doesn't seem as fast. And even with my i7-12700KF and NVIDIA 3060 Ti, my CPU and GPU are maxed out when at high speed sim. As a result, it makes the sim glitchy, and it pauses/stutters from time to time. - No Supported Mods... Mods are great, especially when a game is buggy, since the community is often faster at fixing it than the devs. This is one of the buggiest games I've played, so mods need to be a priority. - Still No Lane Control... Since the traffic AI is so dumb, we need more control of the roads/lanes. Being able to create turn only lanes may really help the AI perform better, and it's realistic. Mods allowed us to do this in CS1. - No Editor Mode for Maps, Roads, Buildings, etc... Why not let us make our own content? Especially roads/interchanges. It would be so nice for me to be able to save what I've made to quickly place it again. Also, I miss making maps. Though I don't think it was a thing in CS1, it would sure be cool to make our own buildings, or edit existing ones to our liking. - Slow Support... I purchased this game late, so many of the most annoying bugs had been fixed, but as I mentioned above, many still exist, and it seems low on the priority list to fix them for us.