Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

"Great controls, average experience"

Disclaimer: This is just a quick game-play review.

Tiger Woods 08 on the DS has all the usual stuff that comes with a Tiger Woods game (or any EA game for that matter): Create a player, Tiger Challenges, and a Tour mode where you win money that you can spend and all that fancy stuff. But for a guy like me, the question is, "How does it play?" Answer: Not bad at all.

The best surprise is the controls. Everything is quick and intuitive. You use the d-pad to aim your shot, and meanwhile get a real-time overview of where the shot will land, along with a marker showing you where your chosen target is. You can also use the stylus to control the view. Either way works fine, and that's the best part about Tiger Woods 08: Both the stylus AND the button controls are a breeze to use, and neither one is lacking anything.

The swing mechanism using the stylus is a snap, almost too much so. You simply drag a path from the ball back and through and bingo, instant 300 yard drive. It's pretty easy to get the hang of, and pretty soon you'll be hitting most of the fairways. The 3-stop button controls are still my method of choice, mainly because it works better when I'm playing lying down. This method has its own share of challenges. You can over swing to gain power, but in doing so it becomes more difficult to hit your shot straight. Like all recent Tiger Woods games, you can apply spin in mid-air (in both stylus and button mode), which is pretty lame. It allows you to correct your mistakes after the fact, instead of getting it right during your shot. This makes the game slightly less challenging.

You have plenty of shot choices: full, chip, pitch, knockdown (I think), and they all seem to have their intended effect. During your shot, you're also guided by a lie meter which tells you what percent of full power you'll get. When the ball is sitting in the rough this usually drops to 70 or 80 percent, which seems reasonable enough to me. This information, together with a percent readout telling you how hard to swing in order to reach your targeted area, are enough info to get the ball where you want it. No real complaints here.

When you get around the green everything is not quite so slick. The targeting mechanism is not designed for you to get fancy with your chip shots (using a 5-iron, for instance) although you can still do it. (You'll be hitting slightly blind.) Instead, the game chooses your clubs based on how close the target is. So the shortest shots will always default to a lob wedge, even if you are only a few inches off the green. This produces a shot that rolls hardly at all, unless you apply forward spin in mid air. In general, hardly any of the short game shots have enough roll. These problems are compounded by the fact that you can't get a grid overlay on the green unless you are actually *on* the green. Or at least, I can't figure out how. In spite of these flaws the short game is not difficult, because you have a nice display telling you the percentage of power to apply to your shot, so it's not uncommon to stop the ball within a few feet of the hole. The complaint here is not about difficulty, but about being true to real golf.

Putting is odd, but serviceable. The green grid is easy to read, but most of the time you'll just place the cursor where the caddy tells you, and assuming you get the swing right it'll very likely go in the hole. If you turn the caddy off you'll have a much harder time, although I expect with practice even that won't be so hard. What's especially odd about it is the physics, or lack of. The greens you are putting on are slower than the shag carpet in my house, and the left/right break is extremely minor even on the most heavily-sloped greens. However, like chipping and pitching, the challenge is good enough, and therefore the experience isn't entirely broken.

Overall, Tiger Woods 08 is an enjoyable title, and I'd say it's very comparable to True Swing Golf. Where one title lacks, the other is usually a bit better, although neither are close to perfect. True Swing has better sound, and debatably more challenging swing controls, but Tiger has better button controls and an overall more intuitive interface. Plus, Tiger has all the extras like online play and Tiger challenges. Going strictly with game-play, if I had to choose one right now it would be Tiger, primarily because of my preference for button controls, although in the time since True Swing and the first Tiger were released I would have expected more progress to have happened. Still, it's a solid-playing golf game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/05/07

Game Release: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 (US, 08/28/07)