After last year’s poor portable attempts at replicating the sublime Tiger Woods PGA Tour experience, EA have pulled out all the stops and given us a fully-featured version this time around. Fifteen courses, a stack of pro players and new mini-games are the order of the day, but is it any good?
As with many games, the answer to that can be summed up with the word “depends.” Whether you think the game is any good or not does indeed depend on whether or not you decide which shot type to use. If you use the swing-stick, which requires you to pull the analog nub back and then slam it forward to swing the club, you’ll probably hate it. If you use the old-school two or three-click system, then you’ll probably love it.
To be perfectly honest, the swing-stick just isn’t a good idea on the PSP. The analog stick on the console is not manageable enough to be able to make sure that you’re always swinging straight, and you’ll find that you’re hooking and slicing your ball all over the show. Switch to the traditional click method of playing though, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 becomes massively more playable. There are additions to the mix that aren’t seen on the home console editions, such as a confidence meter, that waxes and wanes based on the shots that you play. A hole-in-one will give you a massive confidence boost – which gives you temporary skill improvements – whilst hammering it into the sand will sap your rating. If your caddy feels that you’re under pressure – either from your own play or the pressure being applied by the other players in the tournament – you’ll be invited to play a mini-game to settle your nerves. These vary in terms of quality, and task you with cleaning your shoes, cleaning up the area around the lie, or picking your fans out of a lineup. They’re fun, and the best thing is that occasionally, you’ll not want to play them whilst in the middle of a tournament – and the game gives you the ability to dismiss them without penalty.
On the course, everything works as it should although the main focus of any golf game – the putting engine – is not massively impressive. It works – don’t misunderstand me here – but it just doesn’t have anything like the finesse that the home console versions manage to achieve. That is to be expected though and even with that taken into consideration, it isn’t bad enough to destroy the game, given that the nuances that it presents are easy enough to get round.
Creating a player and entering the tour – with the goal being to win the FedEx Cup at the end of the season – is just as fun as it always was, and is handled well on the PSP this time around. Loading is – as it always is with this console – a bit of a pain, but the development team have managed to keep this to a minimum. There are frequent pauses that occur between holes for a bit of loading, but it isn’t for any massive amount of time.
Graphically, the game is pretty good for a 3D PSP title and although it won’t win any awards, things are generally handled well. There are problems with the dynamic camera though, which quite often flips around to an angle that unfortunately doesn’t seem to focus on your ball –meaning that you can’t see where your shot is landing. Eventually, the game catches up with itself and finds the right angle to use to give you a decent view once the ball has stopped.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 is almost the perfect pocket golf title. Were the putting slightly more refined and the analog stick slightly more sensitive and manageable (admittedly, a fault of the console rather than the software, although it should have been taken into account at design-time) – then this would be a must-have. As it stands, things feel a little bit too rough and ready to escalate the game into the echelons of sports gaming history. A decent attempt that is far better than last year’s version, but the game as a whole feels relatively soulless and raw, so it only just scrapes in for par.
