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Tiger Woods PGA Tour '14
Despite recent controversies from both
parties EA and Tiger Woods are back for another year with Tiger Woods
PGA Tour ’14. It’s another year for the franchise and once again
there is quite a beefy list of additions and alterations included, but
do they make playing a round of golf from your couch that much different
than last year’s?
Gameplay
If
this is your first purchase of Tiger Woods in around five years
you will be surprised by the amount of content, but if you’re a fan you
might be disappointed. Sure, there’s now the ability to play golf at
night, more famous golfers and courses to choose from and an increase in
capacity to Country Clubs, but they’re not game changing in the
slightest.
Playing an actual game of golf itself is pretty solid, for the most
part. The game features a well- structured and lengthy tutorial which
really helped me get the hang of the different set ups and swings,
although putting was a little tricky to get used to at the start. Ball
and club physics have been improved since the last rendition making
every successful swing and putt that little bit more satisfying.
As
mentioned before EA has been hounded with criticism over how they handle
the servers of their games. Tiger Woods is another game that has
fallen victim to these issues, but it’s nowhere near as bad as what came
before it. That being said, while playing a single-player game by
myself, all alone, my swings were frequently interrupted by pop-ups
telling me that my connection to the server was lost and I had to
re-connect. I didn’t have any of these issues when playing online
against someone else, so why were they a problem when I wasn’t? I have
complete confidence in EA to bring out a patch to fix it (it worked for
SimCity which now works perfectly), but for the meantime it’s a
distracting and annoying issue.
Graphics
Nothing has changed substantially in terms of appearance for Tiger
Woods ’14 but it’s still a good looking sports game. Character
models are quality translations of real-life counterparts (even tennis
great Andy Roddick has been rendered) and the courses are still and
always pleasant to take in. The frame rate isn’t the smoothest thing
going around but it does the job and shot replays can be on the choppy
side but nothing gets in the way to dampen your round of golf
Sound
As
always you won’t be hearing the foot stomping crowds from FIFA or the
product placement riddled commentary from Madden in Tiger Woods
’14, but what you get is a well developed ambience system that
makes your time on Pebble Beach that little bit more realised. There
have been big improvements to crowd reaction times to your swings and
putts, but they’re still not perfect, and the generic electronic menu
music can become a little draining. Despite that the audio fits a golf
game perfectly and like the graphics any little hiccups shouldn’t have
any impact on the rest of your experience.
Final Thoughts
If you
bought Tiger Woods ’13 this annual upgrade isn’t entirely
necessary apart from some decent bells and whistles thrown in. The
server issues are currently the biggest problem for the game but they’re
more likely than not going to be fixed in the near future. If it’s been
a while since you dusted off the clubs however you may want to consider
pulling them out, because what this game can offer to newcomers is huge.
It’s still a solid golf game and that’s exactly what it needs to be. |
