Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Review

Alf Horsley

For many a year now, Tiger Woods PGA Tour from EA sports has monopolised the market for simulation golf games. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it has done this by beating the competition. Franchises that hold a seat of power like this one can often become complacent and throw out game after game that show little or no improvement, use the same engine and the same features year on year to the point of tedium (Here’s looking at you, WWE Smackdown!). I found that this had happened with Tiger’s early forays into the next gen console market, being identical to the Tours I had known and loved on the last generation to a fault. Having had a break from my beloved series, I looked to 10 to solve my blues and bring me back into the light of the Tour.

At the core of the gameplay, Tour 10 is the same as every Tiger Woods this gen. You judge your shot using wind conditions, surface conditions, distance to the pin etc. and then you imitate your golfers swing using one control stick. You have a multitude of shot options, club options and the ability to use the other control stick to change the angle of your club, utilising high shots that climb hills more effectively but suffer the wrath of the wind more than your normal shot or hitting low shots which are safer from the wind but are killed by changes in altitude on the course. While it’s not very original in comparison, the system being almost completely unchanged for 2 console generations now, you can apply a simple mantra to this: ‘If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.’ This gameplay mechanic simply works, it is fun to play, gives you’re a real feeling of satisfaction (especially when you unleash the button mashing power boost on a drive) and is the closest you could feel to being in the actual game as you can get using a static controller. The only part of the on-course gameplay mechanic that had significantly changed is the new ‘Precision’ putting system. This system replaces the ‘I have a sack of different weight putters hidden just off camera’ system with one putter than can strike any distance and shows you the sweet spot for your selected distance as a yellow bar on a track that displays on your back swing. The new system only offers you one put preview per put, unlike the unlimited of the old system, however this preview augments itself to your alignment, meaning you can lay out your best estimate by looking at the grid laid over the green and then look to see just how good your estimate was and tweak accordingly. As with the old system, putt preview isn’t infallible and factors such as wind, your characters skill and a little luck factor into every putt. While this is a great feature and means that even the greatest of golfers still won’t thrash every putt on the course, it can be a little frustrating to see your putt that the preview said was a ‘straight in’ fall less than an inch shy of the hole. While Tour veterans may be fond of a new challenge, there is always the option of switching to ‘classic’ putters if you wish.

Off the course, Tour 10 is equally a dream. The depth of what you can do is astounding. The club tuner introduced a few iterations ago is still present, and although unchanged completely, remains and invaluable tool for the veteran player in providing a way of adding more challenge and more reward to the game, reducing sweet spots or increasing curve for missing the sweet spot in exchange for adding yards to your shot. This adds more of a risk/reward to the game, in adding those few yard to your drive could cost you the hole if you miss-hit and land it in the rough, bunker or worse, out of bounds. The PGA tour makes another appearance and is, as always, the source of depth for most of the single player game. New twists can be added to tour events in the form of the new Live Weather feature for the Tour (also available on other events) that gather weather reports for that course from The Weather Channel and the feed it into the game so you can play with the course as it is right now. The new ‘Tournament Challenge’ mode is this games ‘campaign’, which changes for every Tour. While lacking the humour of some of the previous single player modes (such as a last gen Tour which saw Tiger travelling through time in an attempt to become the greatest golfer in history like an over the top cartoon bad guy, the player travelling back and beating him and his peers in 5 different time periods to thwart his attempt at destroying the world of golf) it provides a solid challenge and some interesting background as you see events from previous Tours unfold and then attempt to beat the record/player to gain points and unlock new courses to see new events unfold. These do provide a solid and fun challenge, although some of the later events can be downright punishing in things like weather and wind conditions, leaving a ‘it was never like this for them’ feeling of being cheated.

What adds significant value to Tour 10; however, are the newer online features. Online or ‘Live’ Tournaments are tournaments that take place over a day or week where you can drop into the tournament course, get your score and post it up and see where you rank, and if it is a multi-round tourney, see if you make the cut and go on to the next round until a winner is decided. This adds significant gameplay time to the game after the Tour and Tournament Challenge has been beaten, especially that special tournament held now and again hold actual prizes. A specific Live Tournament type holds the most value to for me and that is the ‘Play-The-Pros’ Live Tournament. If there is a PGA tour event being held on any of the courses on the game, it will go up as a ‘Play-The-Pros’ game, in which online players scores are posted in amongst the actual tournament results, allowing you to essentially compete in the PGA Tour through your console (no triple figure prize money or sporting fame included, unfortunately). I can see this not being of much value to gamers who aren’t golf fans, however. Another value-adder in the online aspect of the game is the ‘GamerNet’ Instant Challenge system. At any one time on any given course, the highest score on things like ‘Long Drive’, ‘Closest to the Pin’ or ‘Longest Putt’ can be marked on your course live from other peoples games or on someone else’s course from your game. Beating these benchmarks gets you ‘GamerNet’ points which can be spent on EA Sports website. While these points can only be spent on your avatar for that website, the benchmarks can add extra motivation to game that isn’t going your way or if your just going through the motions on a round you have to play to win a Tour event and the knowledge that you get obliterated someone’s best efforts on a course with the exact same conditions as yours is fairly satisfying. However, on a Tournament Challenge event where you already have set objectives, a contradictory or just plain random GamerNet challenge can be an annoying addition to the UI. The fantastic thing for Xbox players is that all these feature are available to Silver members, so as long as you don’t want to challenge your buddies one on one the budding golfer can gain access to all these great features without paying a fee.

The last this you would think of when you said ‘Golf Simulator’ would be the sound quality. But even in this respect Tour 10 excels with one major exception. The feeling on the course is far amplified by the sound quality. Every shot from every condition shot in every way from perfect to bad to worse has a separate sound effect that have obviously been recorded from the course, not by hitting 2 random objects together in a studio like some past Golf and other simulators from EA Sports. The ‘Tour Atmosphere’ is also amazingly recorded and adds to the atmosphere of every event, building pressure on game winning puts, cheering when you bomb a record breaking drive or seize the lead in a tour even worth millions of dollars or letting out sighs and groans when you hit the rough, the bunker or miss a put. Even the menu music has improved, going from a strange mix of rap and electro that made me think ‘what?’ to a lovely score of ambient, easy listening that instantly makes you think ‘Golf’, the type of music you hear on televised games. The music does get a little bizarre between holes, sounding a bit more like it’d be at home in Call of Duty, but when you really get into a game it can feel a little more at home. The one exception to the lovely sound in this game is the commentary. The commentary has taken a major step down this time, removing the whimsy and humour added to the game with 2 commentator who try and be funny be just plain aren’t. There also seems to be a lot more commentary that is derogatory the players skills, even accusative of ‘poor effort’ at almost every shot that flies as much as an inch off target. This multiplies the frustration factor so much that due to the commentary alone I have BROKEN a controller out of sheer hatred for those commentators. I would easily advise anybody who buys this game to switch the commentary off before they even play a game. This is added to by the fact that the game is graphically beautiful as well. Water features shimmer, sunny skies are inspirational and cloudy skies really give the budding golfer a sense of impeding danger in the level of detail. One particularly stunning feature of the graphics is noticeable on HD TVs and close camera angles. That is that each individual blade of grass is not only rendered, but has it’s own texture showing the central vein n the blade, but also has it’s own active shadow that reacts to light conditions. The game does all this with no noticeable tearing or framerate issues whatsoever, making the picturesque nature of the game nothing short of incredible.

As with any Tiger Woods, it’s a given that the character creation is superb. The system remains the same as last year, making a character in detail tweaking bodily and facial features. Some of the features have unfortunately been cut back, with a great deal fewer options in terms of hair and clothing. There is also the frustrating option of purchasing packs of clothing that you would not normally unlock from the online store of your selected console. Not only is this underhanded in terms of being able to unlock large amounts of items early on, you purchase item in packs of items that give the same level of stat boost to the same stat, i.e. the ‘+2 Power’ pack, that gives the highest possible boost to the power skill. These stat boosts do not stack, so you have to essentially buy the more expensive ‘Max Stats’ pack or buy every single pack if you want to pre-unlock the highest stat boost possible. This eliminates the need for character development, one of the core elements of the game, for people who are willing to pay to skip it, which is nothing short of a terrible thing to do, essentially screwing over people who want to play legitimately in the games expansive and great online modes.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 is nothing short of a PGA Tour de force in terms of what it brings to the table both old and new. While it may slightly exclude gamers who aren’t golf fans with the new ‘Tournament Challenge’ mode, It easily makes up for this in terms of playability, value and sheer enjoyment factor, it’s just a shame that one shoddy addition spoils the near perfection of this game, transforming small amounts of difficulty into frustration in the extreme.

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