Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 Review (Xbox 360) By Mushu1942

6 / 10
02 Aug 2006 at 05:57

Review by: Mushu1942

I have owned all of the Tiger Woods games on the PS2 and I have always been an enormous fan of them, which is strange because normally the only thing that floats my boat is any thing with blood, violence, gore etc… Imagine then, my delight when I saw that it was being released for the 360. Needless to say I was down the shop digging out my hard earned spending pennies on the day it was released.
So, my first impression of the game? Wow. This looked good. Blinding graphics even on the start menu.
I don’t know about everyone else out there, but I’m one of those people that like to have a look around the menus before actually playing a game because I like to know what’s on offer. The menu system seemed to me to be a bit lacking compared to the game’s predecessors, not offering the same diverse range of challenges and playing options. I was not going to let this dampen my spirits though so I selected the ‘gameface’ option. This has previously been a source of great enjoyment for me because I am sad enough to like designing people. (It gives me a godlike sense of power.) Despite being a little scared by the demonic looking template faces, I soon discovered that almost everything is changeable from trendy haircuts to muscle tone. So after five minutes of messing around I had my golfer looking just like me, sadly, with neither of the aforementioned attributes. One of the additions to this version of the game is the ability to give your created character a voice. The one drawback of this is that of the very few voices they had to offer, none of them sounded remotely like me. Not a very important point, you may say, I just feel it is a pointless addition as most people like their golfer be a spitting image of them.
And so I started a career. This is where it started going downhill a bit. The graphics were still stunning, with perfectly textured grass clothing sand and pretty much everything else. There was also the welcome addition of a crowd to watch me endanger woodland animals with my wildly off target tee shots.
I also thought the new controls were good, if not a little tricky to master. In this game, one stick controls the swing and the other controls how you hit the ball. This means you have to be pretty much spot on with both sticks to avoid slicing or flopping the shot. The spin of the ball is also affected by how you hit it making it harder to do.
When I got to the green I was thinking that golf games do not get much better than this but I was soon to eat my words. No caddy tip. Now people out there will probably slate me for this but I found the caddy tip a lifeline whilst putting in the previous games.
Basically, the game is a bit more complex than it’s PS2 brethren. The controls demand more precision if you want to avoid the rough. There is a small amount of joy when you realise you can actually hit members of the audience with stray balls though and there is no denying that the graphics are amazing. What really lets this game down is the severe lack of courses. There is nowhere near the amount I am used to with the previous games. Overall I would say they could have done a bit better with this version and seem to have put all of their effort into making it look nice. I hate to say it, but this game left me feeling a little disappointed. Lets hope TW’08 is better.

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