Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

September 14,2007 - Tiger Woods 08 is back on the Wii just a short six months after Tiger Woods 07 made its rounds this past spring. The series made a good impression on Wii gamers, showing the potential the series has with the Wii motion controls, but has Tiger Woods 08 really improved much at all or is it in need of a full year’s reworking for next year?

The main feature of Tiger Woods 08 comes from the motion controls that attempt to simulate a real golf swing in order to make the game easy and accessible to play. Unfortunately, the three control schemes are not perfect. The three schemes you’re offered are sitting, standing, and Nunchuck, which don’t really require much basic explanation. The standing control scheme is the default and while it works well enough, it’s just awkward to use for anyone that’s really played golf. You’re forced to point the Wii Remote at the ground, not at an angle like you would if you were holding a real golf club. Add in the difficulty in getting a swing with a certain power percentage and a putting meter that fails to allow for precise swinging and the default control scheme is somewhat broken.

Luckily, the sitting control scheme offers the ability swing the remote like a real golf club, or any back and forth motion you can come up with, but it just doesn’t respond well at all. It’s when you’re on the green that it becomes apparent and disappointing, as precise putts are impossible when the virtual golfer’s swing keeps moving a second after you’ve made a full swing. That simply adds more power than you wanted and just ruins the fun. The best of the three control schemes happens to require the Nunchuck and works pretty much the same way that Tiger Woods vets have done since the PS2. Everything else you’re using the remote for on the greens works fine, thankfully. Of course, you won’t be a pro golfer at first, so it takes at least few rounds to get your bearings and making progress.

Luckily, Tiger Woods 08 has a ton of stuff to do as you try to improve your skills. After you create your custom golfer with the Gameface toolset, you get a choice of basic clothes and a chance to spend your first few skill points before you begin. This is where the annoying cursor scrolling starts to harp on your fun, as even having the cursor on the corner of your screen has your scrolling menu spazzing out like crazy, so it’s best to just never point the Wii Remote at the screen until you’re on the course. Once you’re ready to take your golfer for a test drive, there’s plenty to choose from. Outside of the career mode, you’ve got 19 modes, ranging from traditional to arcade and minigame modes, that are great to get a few rounds in with some friends. Tiger Woods 08 offers a new confidence system that’s supposed to go up and down depending on your past history on that particular hole or course, but ultimately it changes little other than adding another meter to the HUD while you’re playing.

The career mode will be the meat of Tiger Woods 08, as it’s where you’ll spend the majority of your time to upgrade your custom golfer and buy new clothes and accessories for it with the money your earn in the three main modes. Tiger Challenge puts a series of honey comb-shaped groups of challenges in your path to ultimately facing off against Tiger Woods himself in a match play challenge. Season mode is what you’d expect, as you play through a series of events hoping to beat the rest of the field and earn some fame and money along the way. Unless your custom golfer has a lot of his skilled upgraded quite a bit from the other modes, it’s not really a good idea to jump into the season mode at first. The FedEx Cup is also exactly what it sounds like, as you cut out the crap of the season mode and can just play the qualifying tournaments of the FedEx Cup along with the finale, The Tour Championship.

Besides just the game modes, there are thousands of items in the Pro Shop to unlock and buy, sponsorships to earn, course memberships to earn, and golfers to unlock as to get deeper into the career modes. The items in the Pro Shop can offer stat boosts to help your player perform a little bit better in certain parts of your game. As far as trophies are concerned, there are several that you earn in the career modes as well as collecting them by doing certain feats on the golf course.

Visually, Tiger Woods 08 looks okay, not any better than what you saw in 07. It’s not impressive in any regard and the created players that you’ll face off first in the career mode generally look better overall than the real golfers that look a little strange at times. The environment itself is rather rough, as the water doesn’t look good at all and neither does the rough or the trees themselves. Sure, you won’t be paying much attention to them as you play, but your initial period spent getting used to the controls will give you plenty of time to study them and find faults all around. As for what you’ll hear while playing, it’s pretty lackluster on the whole, as golf as a whole is a quiet sport and thus doesn’t help the game in that department.

Tiger Woods 08 slices on the fundamentals of the game’s controls, which can only improve as you learn how to compensate for their weaknesses as you dip into the wealth of content that’s at your fingertips. It’s the only way you can find enjoyment in the game that doesn’t make much of a good first impression. A rental certainly should offer enough time to figure out if you can make the controls work enough to warrant a purchase for the dearth of content and even then, it may be worth it to hold off for a price drop while you put that $50 towards something that’s worth your money. For now, if you want great golf gameplay for your Wii, you should already have it for free in the form of Wii Sports.

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