Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2009

Rating: E

Score 9.0/10

        This hardest sport is back for another year.  Is Tiger only as good as last year or does he have some new tricks up his sleeve?  This game is available for Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, and PSP.

       The first thing to notice about this game is that it’s not nearly as hard as the real sport, which is a good thing.  It’s a little tricky at first, but after you get a handle on it, it’s a lot better than last year’s game.  There are a vast number of courses, but they all look the same.  The backgrounds in some courses look like they were pulled straight out of a Playstation 1 game.  It’s not a big deal, since everything else looks good.  It’s only a problem if you’re a perfectionist.

      In career mode, you start off carving your character to perfection and then play through all the courses in this game, gaining skills as you go.  When I say “carving”, I’m not kidding.  Perfectionists rejoice:  you customize everything on your character from his/her eyes, the space between his/her eyes, the color of eyes, and the shape of the eyes, just to touch on some customizing of one feature.  After facial appearance is complete, you give your character some muscles.  That includes arms, legs, upper body and lower body.  Choose what they wear – hats, t-shirts, sweaters, shorts, pants, glasses, jewellery are all included.

     Now their swings!  By now, you’re tired of customizations but you’re almost done.  You choose how they swing, putt, and react when they win or lose.  It takes a while to fully customize – it took me an hour!  You could skip all that and choose all default, but that’s boring and unoriginal.

      Once you’ve shown your skills, and signed some contracts with big names like Adidas, you can change your appearance a little more and golf some more.  If it’s not obvious by now, if you hate golf, this game won’t please you.

      If you’ve got the hang of all the golfing, or your buddy has the game too, you can go online.  Online you can either golf with a buddy, play golf with anybody looking to golf or check leaderboards.  In normal golf, you hit the ball then wait for your buddy to hit his/her ball.  In this game, though, you go at the same time.  It seems like a good idea, and it is.  It’s faster and more fun, but mostly, faster.  Not all golfers are the same.  I never take practice swings, but a lot of golfers I faced did.  If you beat your competition to the hold, you can watch the other golfer finish up.

      This game is a surprise.  Most sports game never improve very much from year to year.  This game is a decent leap from last year’s installment.  If you are (or want to be) a golfing fan, this game is worth a try.  If you’re not, this game might change your mind.