Well another year another Tiger Woods game… And what a year it’s been for Tiger personally with some revelations that may have surprised and shocked some, and certainly affected the great one’s golf game. Like me you probably thought “who cares?” But whatever your personal view of Tiger’s off-course antics the future of Tiger Woods’ as a marketable entity was under serious risk. Fortunately along with many other of Tiger’s wiser sponsors, EA had the common sense and self-awareness to stick with him and so here’s the 2010 version of the best-selling golf franchise ever. And no, sadly despite rumours to the contrary there is no Cadillac Escalade-sponsored fire hydrant & tree slalom racing minigame, and no sign of any waitresses, lapdancers or irate (ex) wives in-game either. The main difference for this year’s game is replacement of cold, hard cash with XP (eXperience Points).

The 17 courses are a fine selection of the world’s best “spoilt walks” with TPC Sawgrass, Turnberry, St. Andrews, Bethpage Black, Oakmont, Wentworth, Pebble Beach, TPC Boston, Hazeltine, East Lake, Torrey Pines, Wolf Creek, Liberty National, The Greenbrier, TPC Scottsdale, Whistling Straits and this year’s Ryder Cup venue Celtic Manor, with several other courses already available to download for the Xbox 360—some of which are what I’d term an exorbitant 800 Microsoft Points each (currently £6.85/€9.60/$10.00).

The weather is now truly dynamic and the wind isn’t constant and easily allowed for either; meaning that you need to wait for the wind to drop or at least settle in a constant ‘blow’ before hitting a shot or your carefully aimed and perfectly hit shot may be blown 20-30 yards off line by a sudden gust. If it comes on to rain during a round this’ll also affect the speed of the greens substantially, and the rain may also stop leaving the greens wet for a while before drying out and speeding up again…

Gameplay has been tweaked and tuned, the ball physics are even more realistic than before and TW still plays a damn fine game of golf, but there still seem to be huge gaps in yardages so you’re often expected to perform 30-40% swings with the analogue stick to achieve the desired distance, which not only looks daft but is quite difficult to do. Low-flying punch shots have been improved and act more like a real punch shot should, but even this doesn’t fill a noticeable gap in the range of shots available. Short shots are easier to judge accurately with the alternative pre-analogue stick “3 click” method (you can toggle between control methods in-game by clicking R3) but this of course shouldn’t be the case and it shouldn’t be necessary. For some reason this year’s game’s shots out of rough or bunkers seem to have been completely randomised and the guideline percentage distance you’re quoted literally means nothing when you’re in a bad lie. While a bad lie in the rough obviously affects the accuracy of a shot and the distance it’s possible to hit the ball, this wild inaccuracy isn’t very realistic for the typical shot with an average lie in the rough. While any increase in the difficulty in a TW game is a good thing in my opinion, this wasn’t the way to do it. You also still can’t hit woods out of a bunker or rough, and, given the fact that the game features the latest hybrid clubs designed specifically for this type of shot, makes this a completely daft omission. You won’t have many problems with trees as the game seems to move your ball to a favourable position nearly every time you ever go near one, but should the overhanging branches of a tree be in the way then the game’s simplistic and clumsy collision detection are revealed. There’s no chance of hitting through the branches (something good old Outlaw Golf 2 allowed 6 years ago thanks to its aiming trajectory line) in this game, a tree is a completely, and unrealistically, solid obstacle, and although you can change the elevation of the player view slightly you can’t pull the camera out to get a better view of a shot, meaning it’s a matter of “hit and hope.” I mentioned the improved ball physics (the ball seems to follow contours even more realistically than before) but there are still no eventualities for those putts that lip the hole and “horsehoe” out, or the ball hitting the back of the hole hard, popping in the air and dropping, things I’d have expected to see improved upon.

Focus is recharged with good shots that don’t get “tweaked” by you, and items can be bought from the pro shop to enhance the recovery speed of the focus gauge. If this all sounds a bit too fiddly and like cheating then you can of course play the game on “Tour Pro” setting which doesn’t allow for any power-boosted shots or in-flight spin control. A new mode (“True Aim”) even removes all the pretty camera angles and means the game plays like golf games of old, with no yardage meters or aiming lines to help you judge distance. While this may feel and look more realistic and may be the Holy Grail for TW fans who’ve always wanted a more sim-like experience, I found I missed all the bells and whistles that the more familiar Tiger game gives you, and that playing the game reminded me more of good old Leaderboard on the C64 and Amiga than playing real golf…

There are problems with the replay cameras which frequently pan out so far during a shot that you can’t see where the ball is (even on the 42” screen we playtested the game on) and the gameplay camera also frequently cuts away just as the ball reaches the hole, leaving you momentarily clueless as to whether the ball actually went in or not! — how daft is that? There is also what can only be described as a bug that means sometimes the camera will cut off while the ball is still moving; this has happened to us with shots that are rolling down slopes or off the cliff at Pebble Beach—this was out of bounds, but the screen went BLACK for something like 30 seconds (during which time we began to think the game had crashed) before the ball finally came to rest at the bottom of the slope and the game decided we could have our game back.) It even happens with putts on particularly quick or slopey greens, and needs to be patched—it’s amazing, truly AMAZING that a glitch this obvious and common got through the beta testing stage—presuming that there was one. The camera also arbitrarily gets stuck to a green-end view of the shot from which you can’t do anything but hope (usually in vain) to catch a glimpse of the ball. Honestly, it’s like the cameras are being operated by a crew of monkeys, and the director is the biggest monkey of all. When you do hit a great (or just plain interesting) shot you still can’t just call up a replay of it and save it for posterity, you have to save it as a Gamernet challenge and replay it that way.

The Ryder Cup (a 12-aside team game played between the USA and Europe every two years) is featured in the game and you can either play it as a one-off event and play as any of the pros or wait until the end of the career year and play it with your own player. This works quite well; you choose which team you want to play as and can even select the team lineup, and you can switch between matches after every hole, maybe to take over a game/player that's losing to turn their match around. As I mentioned earlier the venue for the match (Celtic Manor) has been beautifully realised and this famous old event would have been quite a special addition if it hadn't been done in such a half-assed way. There are no "gimmes" so matches don't really feel like matchplay, and the player roster doesn't have enough of the real players, so the teams include interlopers like Retief Goosen (South Africa), Adam Scott (Australia), Camilo Villegas (Colombia), Vijay Singh (Fiji) and even a couple of women to make up the numbers! (shudder). When you think of the money EA spend on the licenses for FIFA, NBA, NFL and NHL players being too tight to pay for at least 24 European & American golfers' names and likenesses seems ridiculous, and spoils the whole thing—maybe we should be generous and presume it was down to time constraints, but it does seem remarkably slapdash.

As usual in the TW series every improvement seems to be countered by a new or recurring flaw, so while they (finally) seem to have got the rules regarding drops after the ball is hit into a hazard, in water or out of bounds correct (most of the time) you still aren’t given the option of what to do with a ball that’s landed in a hazard. At least now sometimes you’ll see your player take a quick, honour-breaking and realistic hole-out for tap-ins, but as I just said; there’s still no “gimme” option during matchplay! Given the fact that the all-matchplay Ryder Cup is such a big part of this year’s offering it seems a strange—careless even—thing to miss out. And as the game loves to spout the rules of golf at you (until you turn them off), it’s kind of ironic that there are also a number of camera platforms on the courses but there’s no provision for them so you should manage to land a shot behind one you just have to play it as it lies, directly in conflict with the rules of professional golf.

So there you have it; another badly flawed Tiger Woods game that brings some good new ideas to the table but does so in a sloppy or half-assed way. It’s still the best game of golf out there but really needs more dedication, care and attention if it’s to recapture its best form, not unlike Tiger himself.