Review: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 (360)

Upon starting the game you’re greeted by the yawn inducing vocals of Hank Haney, the real-life coach of Tiger Woods. His ‘acting’ is by far the worst we’ve ever heard, and that includes all genres. It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if he actually gave you some decent rundown of how you play, but he doesn’t. Instead relying on simple responses such as “good shot” and “lets try that one again”. At the start of the career you have to go through some challenges so Hank can judge how well you perform and adjust your stats accordingly. Then after each completed tournament your stats are then adjusted once more to show you how well you’re playing and which of your skills need improving. What could have made this better is if Hank actually gave you detailed feedback on your game rather than simple one line responses. As it is though Hank is just a complete personality vacuum.

The other new addition to this years edition is the club tuner. This is purely for golf fanatics. Here you can adjust the spin, power and workability, getting the best out of each club. Not necessarily a new gameplay improvement, but it’s also good to know that the various bugs found in the 08 edition (freezing, odd glitches) have seemingly been sorted - we certainly haven’t noticed any - or maybe the patch we downloaded at the start erased them all. One thing that remains unresolved though is the Vision Camera support. Like so many create-a-character games now, you can use your own face for your custom golfer.  There are two problems with this. Firstly the process is ludicrously long, taking us almost half an hour, not just getting the right position for the photos but also the loading bar that appears at the bottom of the screen. Then when the process was finally finished our face made the character look like a burns victim. We think this current generation feature needs a bit more work.

An excellent feature that was seen in last years edition has now been refined, the GamerNet challenges. Sometimes as you play a course in the career a circle appears somewhere on the green. This is a challenge straight from the Internet where you just have to get it in the circle to earn points. They can be accuracy related shots or just how far you can hit the ball. They add an extra element of challenge to the already difficult career mode. On top of this you also have a mini-game collection, challenges and much better online play.

Playing a round of golf on your own is bad enough, playing with others and you’d best have an entire afternoon at your disposal. With the new simultaneous play though you can go through each round as quickly as you would in single player. Just like it says on the tin up to four players play a hole at the same time with a line showing where each players ball is travelling, something which we found to be highly embarrassing when we kept ending up in bunkers.

Graphically the game is a little rough around the edges. Tiger Woods, as you’d expect, is easily the best modelled out of all the golfers. The rest though can often look like puppets, especially when performing the completely over the top animations, which can see clubs being thrown and grown men having tantrums. Sound does not fare much better either, as beyond Hank, the commentators sound like they’ve got better things to do with their lives. The sound on the course is much better, but then we’d like to think it’s not that hard to record birds cheeping and balls being hit.

Tiger Woods 09 certainly has a lot of life in it. A good online mode and lengthy career will easily keep golf enthusiasts hooked until the next edition. Gamestyle believes that next release in the series will need more major improvements if EA want people to part with their hard earned once again.

Rating: 7 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver