PBA Pro Bowling 2023

I had a lot of fun with PGA Pro Bowling 2023, but it required a lot of patience and practice to master the techniques and craft of bowling to score consistent strikes. From the little research I did on PGA Pro Bowling 2021, it appears that there aren’t many significant changes to the game overall with the aesthetics of the menu system and everything else being largely the same. I spoke with a friend who played the 2021 version for hundreds of hours and he explained that the difficulty level especially for newcomers to the game, has increased.

It’s hard to recommend PBA Pro Bowling 2023, even though there’s nothing inherently bad about it. Sure, its presentation is really subpar, but as a bowling experience, it does offer more than I was expecting. That’s the problem, though: it’s a bowling video game. It’s very limited in terms of scope and gameplay, despite featuring a career mode and licensed players. You can’t help but feel like you could get similar experiences in other games that just so happen to feature bowling as one of their side activities.

Ten-pin bowling works as a little minigame, aimed at a social and party environment. It’s a simple, easy-to-grasp sport, and the consistency with the rules makes it ideal for pick-up-and-play fun. However, PBA Bowling 2023 aims to be more than that. This wants to be a serious simulation of a sport where the skill involved cannot be adequately abstracted into button presses. As a result, while PBA Bowling 2023 is a perfectly well-made game that is free of bugs and glitches (sadly a rarity among niche sports titles), it is also an intensely boring, shallow game. You’re better off sticking to the light and frivolous take in Wii Sports.