Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10

One of the first things you see when you load up Tiger Woods 10 is a presentation explaining what’s new in this year’s game. Because these days it’s so vast that no matter how significant the additions, there’s always a chance you might miss something buried amid the countless options and modes.

You certainly can’t accuse it of lacking value for money, especially the version that comes complete with a MotionPlus dongle. With one of those plugged into the remote, your movements are replicated much more accurately. It also senses any twist in your wrists during a swing, and a little graphic in the corner of the screen shows exactly how the club face is addressing the ball.

Surprisingly, the extra sensitivity doesn’t make the game any more difficult. After slicing a few early attempts, we soon adjusted to it, and the way the character in the game responds instantly to every twitch of the remote makes it all that little bit more believable. The putting system has been upgraded, so it’s based entirely on the power and distance of your stroke. It’s possible to hit the ball quite hard with just a short backswing, and we often overshot the hole. Still, you can always revert to the old system if you don’t get along with it.

Disc golf is another of this year’s new ideas, replacing the ball and hole with a flying disc and a basket on a stick. We had a bit of trouble throwing the disc in a consistent straight line, which is exactly what happens to us in real life. It’s not a mode we’ll be going back to very often, but then it’s just one of many facets to a game that’s so large you could ignore more than half of it and still get months of entertainment out of it.

There’s also the option to hook up to the Forecast Channel so every course will have the correct weather conditions updated live. Staggeringly pointless, yet it’s somehow strangely impressive that somebody would bother to make such a feature.

The Career mode is good. We liked that bit. You get to play minor tournaments to build up some cash and boost your stats, then enter the big-time where the marquee names work the crowd into a fist-pumping frenzy. An added layer of television presentation helps distinguish the major competitions. You can even play tournaments online, although that option wasn’t up and running at the time of review, so all we got was an error message. Anyway, with 27 courses to explore – that’s 486 holes of golf, math fans – we’d want to play a lot longer offline before we’d consider venturing onto the net for a thrashing. Beast of a game, this.

Jun 8, 2009