Well, the ball rolls differently...
Bugger. It’s not.I’m not too sure that at this point I need to carry on with the review as the message, if you haven’t got it already, is that any of the previous Tiger Woods PGA Tour games will do just as well as this 08 version. But just in case, let’s go through the actual golfing experience itself.
TrueSwing, that marvellous invention that lets you control the club head by pulling your mouse back and forth, appears to have been fiddled with and made less sensitive. This is a bad thing. The entire point of golf, other than wearing silly clothes and thrashing around wildly in waist-deep nettles, is to hit the ball cleanly and smoothly and get it to go where you want.
The old TrueSwing was a finickity beast that’d jump up and bite you if you weren’t being careful. It made a round of golf in Tiger Woods PGA Tour much more realistic, with shots you thought you’d hit perfectly getting a bit of hook and others you thought you’d fluffed landing within inches of the pin… The point is, it took some real skill to hit the ball cleanly but now, well, short of deliberately sabotaging your own swing, you’re pretty much assured that you hit the ball roughly where you expect it to go.
Click for larger imageBut there have been some changes in the ball physics which do make a difference. For a start, the wind has far more effect on the ball’s flight than before. Of course, the longer the ball is in the air and the more looping a trajectory, the more the wind will blow it off course., more so that previous versions. Still, once you’ve adjusted to this it starts to feel like old Tiger Woods PGA Tour games again.
The way the ball behaves on the ground has been improved too, with the terrain playing more of a part on how the ball behaves. Previously the ball would just bounce off the course like it was a flat surface, even if you’d hit a 45⁰ slope dead on. Now that same impact will pretty much stop the ball in its tracks. Sometimes you’ll even get a lucky bounce off the edge of a bunker which might slow an overshooting ball. But these minor improvements still don’t make up for the fact that what you’re playing looks and feels the same as pretty much every other PC version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour.
