Golf is silly.  It was ruined for me by my father’s love of the sport.  On principal, I cannot like it.  My real life golf experience is limited to a number of times at the driving range and a couple of instances where me and some friends jumped the fence at night.  His property bordered on a golf course and while under the  influence it seemed like a good idea.  Most of my golfing has been…frustrating.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 then captures the essence of golf perfectly.

But hey, my old man has always felt a certain level of frustration with the sport of golf so its only fair that the video game should include that.  In Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 frustration comes because you narrowly missed the perfect shot, misread the green, didnt pay attention to the wind direction…in other words the things you have to consider when playing golf.  In an attempt to minimise your frustration, it introduces Tiger’s couch, Hank Haney.  Initially he’ll give you some shots to take in order to gauge your skill level.  After a game, Hank will also pop up with some of the things you did badly.  He will will then teach you how to do them better by putting you back at the same shots you ballsed up.  His tips generally are too vague to be of any real use and  his voice over work is pretty bad.

You can create your own golfer.  The options are fairly extensive and has Photo Gameface support.  You can also dress your  golfer in a wide array of silly looking golf clothes.

There are a whole lot of tournaments to take part in.  Way more than I had time to get to.  The course selection is pretty extensive with all the regulars and a few you don’t normally see.  The Tiger Challenge is once again present with ten golfers that get more challenging as you go along.  Obviously Tiger is the last one you’ll face.  Each golfer has nine different challenges as well as a nine hole playoff.  This mode alone offers quite a lot of play time.

As you play and finish games, it gauges your performance in key areas.  Based on how well you did, it then modifies your attributes.  This means that your virtual golfer increases with skill as you improve your skills.  Likewise, it will also decrease attributes if you play poorly.

While the traditional three-click swing system is still in place, the focus is on using the left analogue stick for swinging.  It has a real-time feedback meter that clearly shows how steady your shot is.  Turns out mine is not nearly as steady as I would have thought.

In order to off-set your own tendancies you also have the ability to tune your clubs.  You go onto the driving range and make changes to your club until they hit just right.  You can make tonnes of adjustments that change the workability, power, and spin tendencies of each club.

I only got time to play one game online (golf takes ages).  Luckily it has “simultaneous play” which shortens the length of online games.  You may still be looking at an hours worth of golfing, but that’s a damn sight shorter than previously.

One of the coolest features in Tiger Woods PGA Tour is “GamerNet”.  When playing in any mode you may see a message pop up saying that there is a GamerNet challenge at your current location (set by others online).  If you beat it you get points and your achievement will be entered in the books.  Its an awesome way to integrate community features into the singleplayer experience.

Graphically it looks decent. It would have been nice if all player models looked as good as Tiger’s.  The rest of the graphics are a bit hit and miss but they are serviceable.  Audio is a massive fail.  While the general game audio is good, Hank Haney’s voice over work is terrible.  And as terrible as that is, the commentators are worse.  I very quickly turned them down in the game audio menu (read mute).

Tiger Woods PGA Tour is a good golf game.  I played it for a quite a few hours which says a lot.  The elements I found frustrating were limited to my own lack of skill.  As I said, it captures the essence of golf.  But golf is still a silly sport.  If you enjoy golf games, you probably already have this one.  If not, go get Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 12:22 am and is filed under Games, Reviews, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.