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Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Review - Xbox 360

Introduction

Tiger Woods makes another step out onto the fairway with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10. Last year's game provided a very comprehensive golfing title, yet EA has again pulled out a few extra features from the bag to push things forward that tiny bit more.

Gameplay

Things for the most part are the same as included in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09. There is standard Stroke Play, Match Play, some variations such as Stableford, and Battlegolf, a few mini-game challenges (against mostly local players), and a comprehensive online tournament system. This allows you to take on GamerNet online challenges, play others in a casual match, or for those that wish to get more serious, they can play real live tournaments, and progress in world rankings.

The main mode of the single-player game is the PGA Tour in which you create an character (or play as one of the real-life Pros), and play a full season of the Tour. There are several matches each month, and nearly 10 months of tournament, so as you can imagine, it takes quite a while to advance through a full season. Like the last game, as you keep playing your power, accuracy, and short game improve, and after each round, Tiger's Coach Hank Haney gives you some tips and extra coaching to help improve your stat points.

One of the better modes of last year, Tiger Challenge has been given the flick, which is a shame because the goals were often quite varied, and it was always entertaining. To replace this, TW10 introduces Tournament Challenge. This takes you right to the match, hole(s) and conditions that have taken place in the PGA Tour in recent years. Here you are trying to beat shot-by-shot those made by the player that day in the game. So you watch the real shot, and then have to play out things yourself. The first couple of these are quite easy, but they really ramp up the difficulty after a few. Rewards and unlocks are given as you progress in the Tournament Challenge. While it may be a good one for true fans who follow the game, it can blend into the rest of the game types, and probably not quite as fun as the old Challenge mode.

This year, dynamic weather makes an appearance for most of the game modes. This allows each course, and the play, to be effected by changing weather such as rain or driving wind. For instance, in heavy rain, your ball is more likely to come up short, rather than keep rolling, so more power needs to be applied. More interestingly the game can actually download the real weather from the Internet for that particular course on that day, making you play the exact weather as it is right at that moment. This level of realism is really starting to blur the lines between the virtual game and the real thing, and is pretty impressive.

While ...

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