Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Review

Up and Down.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 plays it safe – lays up instead of going for the green.

Andrew Newman |

June 9, 2009

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With each passing year of a console generation, it becomes more challenging to review the annual iterations of the industry’s venerable sports gaming franchises. Both EA Sports and 2K Sports seem committed to the “one engine per generation” philosophy, which makes sense fiscally but makes it difficult to differentiate this year’s release from the previous one. Enter Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010. I suppose the typical way to review this title is to list the sexy new features (which can incidentally be found on the back of the packaging) and discuss whether or not they work. So if that’s what you came to this review for, here’s a quick rundown.

Precision putting offers an alternative to the point-cursor-and-swing putting mechanic of previous releases. You now have to be concerned with putter velocity during the actual swing, instead of just in the setup. It’s a more realistic mechanic than before, but does it make putting any easier or harder? Not really, especially if you rely on the putt preview that is available in easier difficulty levels and shows you the line. Live Weather, which translates real-world forecasts into in-game course conditions, provides a great deal of atmosphere, affects only the putting portion of the game in any sort of dramatic way. Additionally, there’s not much gray area between a dry green and one that is completely water-logged. They’re either fast or slow.

Tournament Challenge is a new career mode that replaces the aging match play world tour of past offerings. Instead of facing a diverse cast of pros and fantasy golfers in straightforward showdowns, you’ll have to participate in scenarios from previous real life PGA events, like matching Tiger’s double rollercoaster ride putt on the 17th at TPC Sawgrass in the 2001 Players Championship, or playing a certain sequence of holes in under a stroke maximum. This mode represents a change that needed to happen, but I have to admit, I miss Pops Masterson and his heart attack taunt.

The issues I have with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 have more to do with design philosophy than the on the course action, which is solid but not anything new. This is the sticking point: the franchise tries to be all things to all people. I know, I know – All sports games are populist affairs, with features and gameplay that can tweaked for any player or any skill level. But in this case EA Sports has created a series that seems stuck between the world of the hardcore simulation and the casual pick-up-and-play genre. For one, the analog swing is more forgiving than it should be – always has been and still is. But I’m not issuing an indictment of the difficulty or the gameplay balancing – it is more about the contrast between the features themselves.

While the action on the course is as serious and straight-laced as you would expect out of a licensed PGA game, the secondary options often cut against the game’s atmosphere of realism and propriety. Why should I be able to visit the pro shop and buy a Nike shirt that increases my driving distance by a percentage? I can understand how actual equipment (that is, clubs and balls) might boost in-game stats, but clothing? That’s ridiculous. That’s not even mentioning the clown suits, medieval armor, and other absurd outfits that you can paste onto your avatar. This is the problem: In its underlying aesthetic, the game tries to have the kind of appeal that a quirky Japanese golf series like Hot Shots possesses, but it doesn’t jive with the realistic bent of the license or the gameplay. The stat-juicing clothing and costumes are a longtime feature of this series, but have always been sort of a half-hearted attempt at relieving the game’s ultimately sterile feel, which is something the series has always struggled to overcome.

I’m also disappointed that we’re now nearly five years into the current console generation, and the series’ features are just now catching up to the final iterations of the last generation. The number of courses now finally surpasses that of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005, for the last generation’s hardware. To be fair, EA Sports’ focus this generation has been more about online play than rendering new courses for the series, but the question still remains: why do sports games have to begin a new console generation with a mere pittance of features and then work up to a more robust offering? Is creating and perfecting a gameplay engine so much of a resource drain that some features can’t make the immediate shift to the next generation?

Speaking of online play, this title has it in spades. Without going through the entire litany of things you can do online in this year’s version I’ll simply say this – online is where it’s at with this game. I will provide one parting admonition – when the 12-year-old with the golfer in the clown suit out drives you on the seventh hole at Turnberry, resist the urge to unleash a torrent of expletives.