Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 Xbox 360 Review

With its revolutionary analogue swing system, it may have introduced a new control method to golf games, but latterly the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series hasn’t exactly been known for its groundbreaking innovations. The 07 edition largely sticks to this familiarity, but as always brings along some welcome tweaks to better hone an already mechanically sound golf game.

The analogue swing system makes a welcome return, as does the GameFace feature, which is more extensive than ever before and gives you all the tools to create the freakiest, most down to earth – or anything in between – character imaginable, it’s almost a game in itself.

On the course, things will be familiar to anyone who has played recent entries in the series. The left stick remains as the swing stick, where anything from straight, fade to draw shots can be performed whilst the right one is the loft stick, which allows you to hit higher and lower trajectory shots, a perfect method for avoiding pesky objects in your path.

The new addition of the “True Aiming swing system” makes for a more accessible game of golf than the series has offered before and will undoubtedly irk the naysayer, who has always found the game to be lacking in challenge. True aiming is much more of a trivial feature than the name may suggest and is simply a circle, which differs in size, depending on the stats of your golfer, and indicates where your ball will come to rest following a decent shot.

The PGA Tour Season is unsurprisingly the primary mode of the game. Here you’ll work through up to five years of events – as either a rookie Tiger Woods or as your own GameFace character – as you strive to become the FedEx Cup Champion. To do so, you must train your characters in specifically created events or by taking good shots during the actual competition.

Unsurprisingly there are some new modes this year, the largest of which is the “Tiger challenge”, which replaces the Team Tour mode (for some reason or another it’s missing from this next gen version). Here, you’ll go head to head against fictional golfers with your created golfer, and eventually take on Tiger himself in the ultimate showdown.

Also new is the “one ball” mode, where multiple players use just a single ball, with the first player to sink it being the victor of the hole. Unsurprisingly this is rather strategic, as you can’t dare to always take perfect shots, in the fear that you’ll set it up nicely for your opponent, in that way its more akin to Snooker rather than your usual golf.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 looks truly stunning, with lifelike golfers that display different and spookingly real looking emotions based on their shot. The courses don’t fare quite as well as its guests, but they still look superb, though not quite to the level of photo realism that we had hoped.

As always, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, just like Woods himself plays a great round of golf, but in the gameplay sense it doesn’t offer a lot new over its predecessors, though of course it’s naturally the most finely tuned instalment in the series and obviously the best place to start for series initiates, everyone else will have known before scrolling their eyes across this piece if it was worth spending their cash on. A comfortable familiarly? Or a fatigued game that needs a reinvention? The answer really depends on who you are.

8/10