Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 (Xbox 360)

Bingo Bango Bongo is a game where each hole is worth three points. First on the green gains a point, closest to the pin once everyone is on the green gains a point and lowest score gains a point.

Another new addition is the putting preview. When you are on the green you can hit the left bumper button which will show the exact line of your ball if you hit a perfect shot. This feature can only be used once per shot. The system unfortunately doesn’t seem to be foolproof. Many times I’ve carried out a perfect shot according to the preview only to find something drastically different happens.

For those of you who are most interested in achievement points then Tiger Woods is a fair challenge. There are a few easy achievements, though most require a significant time investment to acquire. The distribution of points is fair.

The online system has had a bit of a rough start. With massive amounts of downtime in the early days people were unable to log on to check challenges and recover their game faces. Fortunately these issues are slowly being resolved and there seem to be less problems each day. One fun feature is the ability to upload your own challenges. If you play a magnificent shot you can upload it as a challenge for other gamers to attempt. Putting certain criteria on the shot can increase the difficulty and therefore the points available for completing it. For example, you might have played a shot where you bounced off the fairway and landed two yards from the flag. You could set that as a challenge where the challenger will need to bounce from a similar location and land within a similar area. Alternatively you may have made a long range putt and could simply post that as a challenge.

A more significant fault unfortunately is more of a game breaker. One of the Tiger Challenges freezes. This means you cannot get the stat increases it would provide. Whilst you can get the points from other challenges, it is not possible to complete every single challenge. Some gamers are having similar freezing issues on other challenges. Whilst there is a workaround to prevent this from happening (holding the A button while your console launches to clear the cache) it is not 100% effective. EA claim in their forums that the patch is with Microsoft for certification and could be released any day. The fault is simply unacceptable, this isn’t the kind of bug where a bizarre combination of events or settings cause a problem, merely playing the game with standard settings causes it to occur. As this is happening to all gamers it should have been an obvious fault during play testing. Hopefully this will get fixed soon.

As a whole the game is a good package. I’m thoroughly enjoying working my way through the Tiger challenges and updating my golfers look as I go through. I’ve heard many gamers say that it isn’t very different to the previous version so this may be a game for hardcore fans of the series or those looking for a high quality Golf game. Hopefully the game will be patched soon, though the unforgivable bug is represented in the final score.