This is my first outing with a Tiger game for a couple of years, having had a gut full of the franchise and its annual updates that amounted to little more than a few new holes here and there, dafter controls and features every year, and its apparent mission to seek out and include less and less suitable music for a golf game (via EA Trax) every damn year.

Well okay then, let’s tee off with a positive, I have to say this is a real looker. Visually, apart from a few tatty PS2-ey bits around edges, the game is genuinely ‘this gen’ with lots of shading, really nice lighting, lots of blades of grass on show, textures galore (raked bunkers look great), even lovelier water (even the waves at seaside courses look better) than before and crowds of spectators and grandstands surrounding the relevant holes at the big events. For the first time that I can recall in the series you also get total draw distances, with nothing popping up as you view a course or see more than you were supposed to on a “fly by” of a hole. One thing that did make me blink with disappointed disbelief is the way holes surrounded by water appear to be just floating – there’s no land underneath the waterline whatsoever!

In-game at long last you also have the ability to see a replay of a good shot from a camera other than the one you played the shot from, with at least 3 other TV-style cameras as well as the original available. So that fact that you can’t save your replays comes as a bit of a surprise – you can turn them into an EA challenge available to play again and again and even upload them to the EA Gamernet servers so everyone else on the planet can try and match or beat your shot, but a simple saved replay to show the missus? Nope, not unless I’m missing something.

The game boasts an impressive 16 courses; the ubiquitous TPC Sawgrass, Harbour Town, Pebble Beach, St. Andrews, Riviera CC, Gary Player CC, Wolf Creek, Bay Hill, Wentworth (West Course), Cog Hill, Carnoustie, Doral, TPC Boston, Westchester CC, East Lake, and if those aren’t enough for you then Firestone is downloadable for a virtual wallet-busting 600 MS points (a whacking £5.14 by today’s rates). They aren’t all unlocked at the start for offline play, but you can play them all online straight away.

Xbox Live is heavily featured with all kinds of online tournaments and online multiplayer game modes, although it still seems next to impossible to team up with a friend in a ranked match against another pair, which is plain daft. Setting up a game is a doddle and you can add all kinds of options including a handy shot clock to keep slowpokes moving. Fortunately now you can also play a speedier game with 4 players on Xbox Live simultaneously, with their balls being represented by an on-screen trail. Finish the hole first and you can watch the others play out – this is a feature that an old favourite of mine, Outlaw Golf 2, had several years ago. I seem to remember EA bought the developers Hypnotix a couple of years back, so maybe, and as I hoped, the good stuff is beginning to filter through at last.

The basic mechanics of the game have changed little since the first Tiger Woods game started using analogue swing control (pull back and push through on the left or right stick to swing), and nor have the ball physics which were impressively convincing 8 or 9 years ago and still do the job (though I’d have liked to have seen a few lip-outs, ‘walls-of-death’ and ‘horseshoes’ going on). It’s almost as if maybe someone at EA has been listening to someone, as this year you can use an alternative ‘old school’ 3-button-click control system if you prefer, and even swap between the old and the ‘new’ on the fly. This 3-click method dates back to some of the earliest of golf games on consoles and was probably perfected on Leaderboard on the Commodore 64/128. You can choose how much fade or draw to put on a ball before you start your swing (this is a much better system than in the last TW game I played, that expected you to accurately move the thumbstick in to out, or out to in to make the ball draw or fade). You can also select how high or low to hit the ball and select from full, punch, pitch, flop or chip swings, meaning that just about any yardage is possible to achieve with practice. By default you can still add spin in flight (by choosing a direction and tapping ‘A’ or the left bumper) and thus change the direction that the ball will bounce or spin when it hits the green, hopefully enhancing your shot (although this is obviously not always the case!) Putting has changed for the better in the two years since I last touched a TW game too, with the hopeless “caddy tip” and the slightly better “Tigervision” replaced by a much more reliable and helpful (if dull-sounding) - “putt preview”; you get just the one preview per putt, and it shows you a trail of where your putt will go, allowing you to make adjustments accordingly for the distance and slope. Outlaw Golf 2 used to give you 3 of these, which made putting a bit too easy, so one is about right.

The difficulty level in the TW games has always been way off the mark and it’s still too easy, but is getting better. They’ve been quite clever in as much as if you win or buy a club or piece of equipment that improves your accuracy or distance significantly, then using it automatically sets the default difficulty of the game a little higher, meaning that you might be able to hit your driver 360 yards now, but your swing will have to be more accurate to get it on the fairway, and shots will also be more affected by the wind or bad lies. As with the other categories (Accuracy, Short Game & Putting) poor performance and hitting lots of wild drives will also dynamically affect your distance attributes, although these can be regained with solid play and visits to the coach.

If it sounds like I hate TW PGA 09 then I do – but only partly. It would have scored a point higher than the 7 I gave it, but I truly hate the lack of care and the confused direction that what is without doubt this mighty franchise’s best outing for several years has gone in - and yet I have found myself enjoying the improved visuals and refined control and upgrade systems. Without turning all the aids off I can now have a game in which I won’t hit EVERY fairway, knock EVERY bunker shot stone dead, or eagle every par 5. While it still may be a tad easy, at least you have to take some care with your shots, and think your way out of trouble should you hook or slice your way into it. I feel that the problem is that TW PGA 09 is still trying to be some kind of entertainment package that a PGA golf game shouldn’t really be, and what I mean is, if the designers want to give you the option of 19 different types of shades, 11 different watches (no, really) or hundreds of different items of clothing why don’t they go do a Barbie (& Ken) game, and leave Tiger’s PGA to someone who knows something and cares even a little about golf?