It's been more than two years, but now you can start dusting off your virtual golf clubs, if you haven't already. 26-year-old Rory McIlroy, current World Number One professional golfer, has knocked erstwhile golf icon Tiger Woods from the title EA Sports' PGA Tour series for the first time since 1998. The question is, what else is new? Has EA Tiburon used these past two years well to bring us the all-around ultimate 8th-gen golf game?
Golf with Limits In light to EA Sports' previous "once-a-year" timeline for releasing new titles in the PGA tour series, the decision to change course is rather odd – instead of releasing completely new titles each year, they're going to keep building upon the current game with regular content updates. And playing the current retail version, it didn't take long for us to see how desperately these updates are needed, as the scope of the game is disappointing on almost every level, and without new content to add some depth to what is currently a pretty shallow base game, it's not going to be able to keep golf fans occupied for long.
The interactive prologue serves as a short tutorial, and features cool cut scenes that really capture the excitement of the sport. A brief look at the main menu, however, seemed to confirm our concerns about this game's long-term appeal. Single-player options include a quick game as well as a career mode that lets you design your own character. For an 8th-gen console game, however, the options here are disappointingly limited, which is obvious from the get-go. It's not going to be easy to create your ideal golf pro, and you can pretty much forget trying to create a version of yourself.
Career modes in games like this are usually a source of long-term motivation and replay value, mostly due to the role-playing elements they feature. Rory McIlroy PGA Tour allows you to choose from three different character back stories, as well as four different “attribute boost” – Balanced, Precision, Power, and Finesse – with space to unlock three more later in your career. There are fourteen attributes in all, including strength, putting (long, mid, and short), spin, and driving. These can all be improved as you win rounds, earn experience points, and level up. You can also earn better clothing and gear as you climb the ranks.
There was thing about the default settings in career mode that we found to be really annoying, and actually a bit surprising – “Quick Rounds” is set to “on”, and has to be turned off manually. What this does is cut tournaments short, chopping them into shorter segments and simulating the remaining holes in ways that don’t often make much sense. You can select “Round Type” in the menu options and turn it off to stop career mode, which is rather lean on content as it is, from being completely emptied out. I mean, they don’t even have the awards ceremonies you typically find in games like this, instead opting for a table filled with dry statistics.
Surprisingly, it’s the Night Club Challenge mode, with its 200 or so individual challenges, that really saves Rory McIlroy PGA Tour from falling through the 18th hole into oblivion. It loosens things up with exciting tests of skill that provide fun and originality in what is otherwise a pretty uninspired game. Challenges include hitting moving objects, landing the ball in point zones, or trying to get the ball through a series of floating rings. For the full effect, players can make use of various “boosts” like rocket balls and sticky balls to help them get that coveted three-star rating.
And that’s about it for single-player, unfortunately. And it’s not just that the game is lacking in variety when it comes to gameplay modes; there are several other important factors where it comes in below par, and not in the good way. There are a total of eight real-life courses in the game, and only twelve licensed golfers make an appearance, among them Rory McIlroy, naturally, as well as Martin Kaymer and Jordan Speith. Well-known golfers like Bernhard Langer and Tiger Woods are nowhere to be found (though in Tiger’s case for obvious reasons), and not a single female professional golfer makes an appearance, either. They try to make up for this lack of content with several fictional golfers and locations, but they’re not fooling anybody. Multiplayer mode isn’t going to keep anyone interested for too long, either – it’s really nothing more than online tournaments and head-to-head rounds against other human players.
Swinging Controls
In contrast to the rest of the game, the developers at EA Tiburon have really done a great job and gotten a lot right in terms of technical gameplay details, especially the controls, which are extremely precise and offer three different swing styles: Arcade, Classic (3-Click), and Tour. Tour is for the most advanced players, offering the greatest degree of realism and sensitivity for those who are ready for it. The Classic “3-Click” style uses a meter to help you get just the right level of distance and accuracy, and is ideal for intermediate players. The most accessible mode by far is Arcade, which features simplified controls and a variety of aids to help players aim and control for other factors.In any event, you're going to have to pay attention to things like wind speed and distance, ground type, traps, and elevation if you want to do any good. All of these factors work together with the intuitive ball physics as the ball makes its way from the tee to the cup. If you end up having to putt, however (and you will), things get a lot more difficult, as the various aids that helped you get the ball to the green will be unavailable. Fortunately, there are four different camera perspectives to help you line up your shot.
Graphics Somewhere Between Birdie and Bogey
Thanks to the powerful Frostbite 3 engine, there are no load times between holes, and everything looks great, at least at first glance. Terrain types like grass and sand look realistic, and excellent lighting effects give the overall picture a postcard feel. From a distance, however – and you can see really far – the image is plagued by low-detail backgrounds, flickering edges, and objects that appear to slip in and out of existence. Unfortunately, time of day and weather effects don’t have any significant effect on gameplay.
The Golf Channel’s Rich Lerner and Frank Nobilo do a great job providing commentary in the sober and restrained style the sport is known for, though they do get repetitive at times. Like other games in the series, this installment is only available in English. Finally, the music and sound effects are pretty much just right for the genre, so no complaints there.
Super jeu il est genial
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