It’s been a decade since Augusta National Golf Course was in a video game, and eight years since we saw St. Andrews on a console. Just going back to these places will be enough for most fans interested in EA Sports PGA Tour — especially following Jon Rahm’s win at the Masters Tournament this past weekend. But the game, now on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, does play a little differently. So they should factor in some time to get familiar before gorging on its buffet of 30 bucket list destinations.

The best way to do so? Honestly, it’s the Challenges mode. Golf doesn’t really need to be reduced to bite-size challenges for video games — it is bite-size challenges, 18 of them making up a round. But the Challenges mode quickly became EA Sports PGA Tour’s signature feature for me, at least in the first week, for how it familiarized me with the tasks these courses will expect later in my (very deep) career mode. I wasn’t prepared to appreciate or enjoy this live-service vehicle as much as I did, but absent a practice facility or tutorial in the video game, I absolutely depended on it to, as they say, get back in the swing of things.

Challenges takes players to one of the game’s 30 courses and gives them three tasks to complete, replicating some performance from real life — for example, Lexi Thompson at the 2019 LPGA Championship or Francesco Molinari making recovery after recovery at the Masters the same year. Each challenge awards three stars, those stars award XP and Reward Points, and those two collectively progress your created golfer or give them cool new skills and cosmetics. (Although the latter are unlocked through a prominent in-game store menu, it’s important to note that nothing affecting a created golfer’s play or improving their game can be bought for a real-money equivalent. That’s all for cosmetics.)

Grid View

You don’t have to complete all three obligations of a challenge in the same playthrough, either; this is what I meant about Challenges supporting repeated attempts. If one challenge is, say, to make green-in-regulation on all four holes (that is, landing on the green in par minus two strokes) and make birdie on two of them, you can focus on sticking the greens in one playthrough and getting the birdies in another.

This isn’t to suggest that the…