Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 review (PlayStation 2)

Having never played any of the previous instalments in the Tiger Woods series I approached this game with a healthy amount of anticipation, the Tiger Woods franchise has been a consistently healthy earner for the EA team and each instalment is generally greeted with a degree of excitement by fans.

Tour the world, Tiger style

It certainly looks the part, slick menu interfaces and good character graphics greet you from the outset, and your first foray onto the tee is rewarded with lush environments and impressive representations of the various golf courses around the world. As you progress through the wide array of challenges and tours you will come up against many of the well known names from the world of golf, all of which appear to have been well modelled and most of which feature celebrations and actions which well represent their real life counterparts.

There are a number of ways to play, the stage progression style 'Tiger challenge' where you are set a series of challenges on your way to a final match play face off against Tiger himself, the PGA tour where you follow through life as a professional golfer, attending the many tournaments and attempting to rise through the ranks, and of course there is the ability to jump straight on to a course and to play against friends.

No bees were harmed in the making of this game

The Tiger challenge presents you with a Honeycomb layout from which you select the challenge you want to undertake next, playing through them all until you can attempt the central challenge which is a match play against a pro. Once that is complete you can progress on to the next level of the honeycomb where you repeat the process until you play the next pro. At first the variety of different challenge types keeps things interesting but you will very quickly find this becoming repetitive. You are asked to compete in a few different styles of events, Par challenges (where you have to complete a set number of holes on or under par), One Ball (where two golfers play the same ball requiring tactical decisions on each shot as leaving your opponent with the ability to sink the put will see you loose the whole) to name just a couple.

Beginning a tour is akin to a standard career mode, you are presented with a calender showing the many events during the year and play them through to the best of your ability. Unless you play through the Tiger challenge before taking this up then your first few attempts will probably find your golfer sadly lacking in the skills required to really make an impact.

Tiger Woods RPG

Improving your golfer is handled by an RPG-esque stat system, no matter which of the career modes you are playing you increase your golfers ability as you go, playing certain types of shot, sinking a long put or adding spin to a drive will see a number of experience points earned at the end of the round. These can then be used to increase the stats of your golfer and improves your chances on the fairway. This works well, in the early stages you will find your self desperately trying to hit tee shots at 100% power just to get a decent amount of distance, as your stats improve you will start to see Par 3 courses where you overshoot the green if you don't play a more careful shot.

On paper this looks like a good game, but the reality of actually playing it turns into a frustrating and disappointing experience. This is so close to being the polished article, but it falls short in areas that are really unforgivable. The control system, is a varied mix between excellent and atrocious. Performing a swing is done by pulling back and pushing forward on the left analogue stick. Any slight variation in the movement (slight pressure to the left or right) will see the shot hook in the relevant direction, meaning that you feel a well earned sense of satisfaction when you get it right. Power off the tee can be well gauged and again on fairway shots. However when you get to the green the power indicator becomes almost useless. Putting from the edge of the green, hitting a shot at 100%, will see the ball roll rapidly past the hole stopping a good distance the other side. Making the reasonable assumption that you have over hit the put and adjusting you power down accordingly will suddenly result in the ball moving only a very small distance. Rather than there being a set amount of power you can apply to your putting, which would then allow you to gauge power according to position, the translation of power percentage to distance covered seems to vary depending on your distance to the hole (I should point out this happened several times on level greens and was not caused by uphill and downhill puts).

Look into the future

Another tool put in place to aid putting is the put preview, this handy tool allows you to make a practice put and see the result before making the real attempt. Unfortunately when you exit back out of putt preview it cancels any alterations you have made to your aiming and sets it back to before you went in, meaning you once again have to guess at the alterations you made. Add to this the fact that the preview has a tendency to zoom in on the top of the ball, so if your shot passes further than a few centimetres from the hole, you can't actually see how far away you were.

During play you will also see a large number of graphical glitches appear, play out of a bunker and you will suddenly notice that the long grass at the top is floating a good distance above the ground. During putting the movement of the ball will pause as it readies the animation for either the ball dropping or passing close to the hole.

Inexcusable errors

All of these things can be excused in one way or another and, unfortunately on a sports title that enjoys a year on year release, they have almost come to be expected. Yet there was one more thing i noticed during this game which borders on ridiculous. For those new to the series a helpful set of tutorial videos are provided to explain the various shot types and game modes. Watching the video for “Alternative Swing” explains the use of draw shots and other such tweaks to the standard swing, playing the video for “Standard Swing” shows the exact same footage. When a game is released with something as simple as the tutorial videos incorrect, you begin to understand why so many other flaws were over looked.

At the end of the day, this is a game that should be good, and very nearly is. If you can look past its many flaws, there's a lot of enjoyment to be found. Chipping in a shot from the rough on the far side of the green, and watching it sink really does come with a sense of achievement, you feel like you earned it. However the number of small glitches and design issues really hinder the enjoyment.