Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (Xbox 360)

EA Sports makes online golfing more interesting than ever.
6/16/2009 5:05 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

If there's one thing that gamers have grown to expect about EA Sports' Tiger Woods series, it's the whole mess of tired and clichéd golf phrases that get tossed into the reviews year after year. ("This year's Tiger attacks the green and gives gamers a disc that's more than just par for the course.") No other franchise has been whacked as hard with the "stick of lazy journalism" as the Tiger franchise. So, in the interest of fairness, this review of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Tiger will use only clichés from other sports. Does Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 have trouble finding the plate, or does it hit nothing but net?

EA Sports threw gamers a curveball this year by rolling out its golf game in the spring instead of the fall. I never could understand the franchise's traditional end-of-summer release date. The PGA Tour season starts just after New Year's and wraps up semi-officially in September with the four FedEx Cup tournaments. (Fall tourneys keep things going until mid-November.) But the new release date does more than just make sense calendar-wise. It also lets gamers experience two of the cooler new features of Tiger 10.

The "Play the Pros" online mode is just flat-out, rim-rattling, pedal-to-the-metal fun. During the season, you can be a part of a virtual PGA Tour event by playing four rounds on the same course that the pros are playing that week to see where you'd end up on the leaderboard. Adding to the realism is the game's new "dynamic weather" feature. If -- for example -- it's raining for the first round of the U.S. Open, you'll be playing alongside Tiger, Vijay and the rest in a downpour. You won't actually get wet, of course. On the other hand, you also won't get 1.3 million-or-so bucks if you win.

The features have their limits, though. Due to the fact that not every tournament course is included in the game, some weeks you'll be playing on substitute courses in Play the Pros. I'm also very curious to see the dynamic weather a few months from now. I'm looking forward to playing a round or two at TPC Boston in February just to see what it's like to play 18 holes in three feet of snow.

But while Tiger Woods' online play has been given a big boost, improvements to the rest of the game aren't as sweeping. The major innovation this time around is a new putting scheme. Instead of having multiple putters in your bag -- one for five-yard putts, one for 10-yard putts, etc. -- you now just have one putter. While this adds to the realism and forces you to be a lot more careful and accurate when reading the greens, once you've decided that you've lined up the shot correctly, an on-screen meter makes it far too easy to execute the shot perfectly. Last year's Tiger could be unforgiving when it came to the putting game; this year it seems the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.