Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09

EA's latest goes with a swing

Since I reviewed Tiger Woods 08 last year I've almost accidentally taken up golf, real golf that is, not the computerised kind. Accidentally buying a ridiculously cheap set of clubs from eBay (1 GBP, yes, really) was followed by much swearing amidst beautiful scenery and has seen me now well and truly bitten by the golfing bug. So, fresh from discovering just how hard a sport it really is I was interested to see how my new found appreciation of all things golf-related would effect my view on this year's Tiger Woods title.

While computerised golf is (thankfully) much easier than the real thing, it's pleasing to find some of the same disciplines still apply, albeit in more manageable forms. Take your swing for example, in real life you can spend your whole life working on it and its success is the key to improving your game. In Tiger Woods the swing (pulling the analogue stick towards you for the back swing, pushing it away from you to strike the ball) proves to be equally important, while the time it takes to get it right is naturally much shorter there's a pleasing similarity in the mentality required between the game and real life. Sitting there concentrating on ensuring you keep the analogue stick perfectly straight each shot isn't a million miles from focusing on all the aspects of your real swing as you stand in front of the ball on a real course. Playing Tiger Woods is obviously not going to improve your real world golf game, but it does push you to obsess about similar little details which makes it feel that little bit more realistic.

Understanding why a bad shot went wrong and learning from this is a key part of golf and TW 09 tries to help as much as possible by letting you see the angle you pushed the analogue stick through. Indicated as a yellow line over an on screen ball icon this seemingly small feature is a real blessing allowing you to try and correct any natural imbalance in your swinging action. If you're more interested in power than accuracy you can risk upsetting your swing by hammering on the X button during your backswing to give you a little extra power which is a nice way of representing the risk/reward nature of putting that little bit of extra oomph into your shot.

As with last year you start with a frankly rubbish golfer and the aim is to try and improve his stats by playing well. To help with this Hank Haney, Tiger's coach, who appears as your in-game mentor popping up after each round with advice and some customised practice routines for you to help to boost your skills. These drills aim to improve the four key areas of your game, power, accuracy, short game and putting and completing them gives you the chance to earn an extra stats bonus by doing a similar task against the clock. It's a nice enough idea but it gets repetitive very quickly and you soon start doubting EA's claim that Hank's advice is 'personalised' in any significant way.

The big change to the whole levelling up system this year is the ability to actually get worse by playing badly. Where as before it was a case of simply grinding through the game improving your stats round by round, this year a bad round can see your stats drop meaning you're never allowed to get complacent. This makes the experience feel far more organic and natural, it's not fool proof however, as you can always play a few easy holes to boost them back up, but it's a definite improvement.

Another new feature this year is the club tuner. This allows you to tweak the design of each club to fit your individual strengths and weaknesses then lets you test them out in the driving range. You may never feel the need to fiddle with things on this level but it's nice to have the option all the same and it can be tempting to try and increase the power of a driver for instance, although doing so will reduce the size of its sweet spot making it that little bit harder to guarantee a straight shot.

Those of you who played the 08 version of Tiger will remember the EA GamerNet and the ability to save any shot you play and upload it for the world to see and try to match via a user-defined challenge. This time out those challenges merge naturally into the singleplayer experience, step up to take a particular shot and an unobtrusive banner appears telling you details of any appropriate challenges along with a faint white circle on the course giving you your target. It's a pleasingly natural next step to an already impressive feature and adds a more competitive edge to single player rounds. For those of you worried about a constant stream of user generated challenges ruining your concentration the feature can be turned off, but seriously, it's good fun and doesn't get in the way.

Probably the most welcome new online feature is Simultaneous Stroke Play, this allows up to four players to play a round together without any of that tiresome waiting for your turn. Instead all players play at the same time with the flight of your opponents balls displayed via pretty coloured trails shooting through the sky. It certainly speeds up multiplayer games and being able to see the ball paths also gives weaker players an idea of what kind of shot they should be going for which can help even things up.

As you'd expect, the by now familiar game modes are all present and correct along with all the major tournaments. The Tiger Challenge mode is still present although it's seen a bit of a re-vamp; nothing revolutionary but instead of having all the challenges on the same board they're broken down into groups that you unlock as you earn more points. The funky Photo Game Face option that allows you to import a picture of yourself (or anyone else for that matter) into the game and map it onto your golfer is all present and correct for those of you who need such things and have the patience to fiddle with it. Real life sports results are still delivered on screen via the ESPN ticker as well as sports radio bulletins, although these are unfortunately American-based.

Disappointingly there's no change to the number of courses included, although the roster has been changed slightly from last year to include five new ones (Sheshan, Gary Player, Wolf Creek, Bay Hill and Wentworth). What's the betting you'll soon be able to pay to download others?

Graphically things are bit mixed. The important bits of the courses look lovely, the fairways, greens, bunkers and water features are all impressively rendered. But step outside of those and there are some distinctly dodgy looking textures that are often shown in all their (non)glory thanks to the otherwise beautiful TV style camera angles. Strangely some elements of the environment never seem to blend together all that well either, bushes and trees look like they've been superimposed at random while the virtual groundskeeper must spend his whole life ensuring the boundaries between surface types are kept unrealistically pristine. The golfers themselves look okay, but they aren't hugely impressive and the crowds are as flat-looking as ever. It's not that things look bad as such, it's just that they don't look great, which is a shame when you consider golf games really don't have that much happening on screen to drain the PS3's processing power.

Overall, however, it's pretty hard to find serious fault with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09. As the latest in a long line of EA golf titles there are bound to be those who wonder if there's enough here to warrant yet another purchase, and while they may have a point it seems a little churlish to harp on about such things when the game in question is of such high quality. Yet again, if you want a golf game then this is the one to buy. The real question is, by raising the golfing bar once again what will EA do to top it next year?

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By Paul Newcombe