- Publisher: EA
- Developer: Tiburon
- Also On: PS3
- ESRB Rating: “E” for Everyone
- Genre: Golf
- Pros: Play the Pros; live tournaments; precision putting; good gameplay overall; boost in difficulty
- Cons: Commentary; glitches
Tiger 10 has all of the features we have come to expect. Sixteen great real world golf courses. Plenty of game variations like stableford scoring, one ball, and more. And a full career mode that lets you build a golfer and take them through a PGA Tour career. We have seen all of this before, though, so I’ll just focus on the new stuff.
First off, the Tiger Challenge has been replaced with a Tournament Challenge mode that has you beating or trying to replicate specific scenarios that have happened in real tournaments. There is also a live tournament mode where various tournaments are set up and you play through the course and post your score against thousands of other players online. Or, to take the live tournaments a step further, you can “Play the Pros” where you play on the same course and in the same weather conditions as the PGA Tour pros are that week and you post your score against their real world scores. Tiger 10 has real time weather updates that reflect what is happening in the real world, so if it is raining in Orlando, for example, it is raining at Bay Hill, which is very cool. Luckily for EA (not for golf fans) the rain soaked U.S. Open at Bethpage Black was a perfect way to show off all of these new features. I played through the rain on glacially slow greens just like the pros, and let me tell you, it was tough!
Gameplay
The only other real gameplay difference is that the difficulty has been kicked up a notch. One of our main complaints the last few years is that the game is just too easy, but Tiger 10 has taken a few steps to remedy that. On the lowest difficulty, you’ll still win with ease, but on the other three levels you had better bring your “A” game. The A.I. puts up much more of a fight now, and you can go to the clubhouse with the lead only to have an A.I. player in a later group beat you. The weather conditions also really make a difference, and just in general it seems like a bad shot hurts you more than it used to as the rough is thick and nasty now. Tiger 10 is actually a challenge.
Graphics and Sound
Graphically, Tiger 10 is a nice looking game. It isn’t a huge improvement over last year, but it looked fine to start with. The courses are lush and bright and look great as always. The character models are good, and using the Vision Camera to put your face in the game produces some amazing results. One improvement we did notice in the visuals is that the water looks a little better and the lighting is quite nice. The sky also looks really good depending on the time of day and weather, etc.There isn’t much to say about the sound. The music is forgettable and the sound effects are exactly what they need to be. The commentary team of Kelly Tilghman and Scott Van Pelt are sort of obnoxious in that they get things wrong and correct each other. We liked this style of commentary in UFC 2009 because it made it more realistic. In Tiger 10, though, commentators shouldn’t be getting things wrong on every single hole like they do here.
There are also a couple of glitches in the game to note. Sound effects cut in and out all over the place (it is particularly bad on drives when sometimes the rumbling “power drive” sound kicks in a few seconds late or cuts out suddenly).
Bottom Line
