supersaiyan23's Full Review: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 for PlayStation 2
I have always been a big fan of the Tiger Woods games for the Xbox and PS2. They have made golf "fun" and have always had a lot of neat features and game modes. Prior to purchasing Tiger Woods 2007, I had TW 05' for both Xbox and Playstation 2. I was still in the process of completing 2005, so I didn't bother to pick up 06' when it came out. I was bumming around Gamestop the other day for some cheap games and found TW 07' for $12.99 so I figured I would give it a try.
After about 2 hours of trying to play the game I went back to playing TW 2005. This game is just way too frustrating at the start when you don't have any attributes built up yet. They also drastically altered the way you build up your character attributes. Before you could use money earned while playing the game to buy attribute points as well as new items in the pro-shop to boost your skills. Now you can only use attribute points that you accumulate in PGA tour season or Team Tiger mode. You can no longer "purchase" attribute points as you could in the past Tiger Woods games. I will come back to this later on.
The character creator or "Game Face" is pretty in depth and allows you to create a fairly life like version of your self on the game. You can adjust everything from brow height to bicep size and there are skin, eye, hair, etc. colors galore. The coolest thing about the character creator on TW 2007 is that you can now customize your own golf swing and test it out before you create your player. The only complaint I have about the character creator is it has the exact same hairstyles from the 2004/2005 games and it would be nice to have an update after 2-3 years.
After you build your character it's time to go to the pro-shop to get some new clubs and some killer threads to play golf in. The one thing I really like about TW 07 is they drastically scaled back the prices on items at the pro-shop. Before you would pay $50,000-$100,000 for a driver or set of irons. Now they are scaled back to $1000-$4000 and the clothes and accessory items are a lot cheaper as well. This makes it easier to get equipment bonus points to help improve your character. The pro-shop interface is kind of annoying though, everytime you select an item a little pop up box comes up with the description and it takes a long time to go through all the different items. The interface used in 2005 is much easier to navigate.
2007 has all of the same game modes as TW 05/06 with one exception, they took out the world tour mode and also the mode where you can challenge the classic golfers and replaced it with "Team Tour." The premise behind this is that Tiger has recruited a team of 3 other players and they are taking the world golf scene by storm. Your mission is to go around the world and recruit players to make your own team that will challenge Tiger for the top spot. This is similair to world tour mode in that you will go to all the different courses and play against some of the same opponents from the world tour modes in games past. The difference is there are different game modes, it is no longer just straight up match-play. One of these new modes is "one-ball" where you and your opponent take turns hitting the same ball. The last person to get it in the hole wins so you have to strategically set yourself up by forcing your opponent to have tougher shots.
Overall, for me, Tiger Woods 2007 just doesn't stack up to previous games in the series. It's almost like they said, "hey, this game is way too much fun. Let's try to make a serious golf game." In doing this, they have made the game almost painful to play at the early levels. Without decent attributes, you have trouble reaching some of the longer par 4s in 3 shots and your accuracy is horrid. I have a rule that anytime I am better at a sport in real life than I am in a videogame, I turn off the game. The computer also does not let you use all of your clubs for different shots. You can no longer hit driver out of the fairway as you could in previous games and in certain lies it will only allow you to use your wedges and no other irons/woods.
This makes the game painfully frustrating at first. I found myself getting angrier playing this game than I do during a round of real golf and that just isn't how it should be. The graphics really are not that great for a PS2 game, I swear some of the backgrounds came from Tiger Woods PGA tour for the PS1. The graphics are not an improvement over TW 05/06 and the load times between holes seem longer as well. Overall this game is just not as fun as previous versions and I feel that has taken a lot away from the game play experience. I feel like I just wasted $13, I probably should have just invested the extra $15 and bought TW 2010. At least then I'd have a new game to complain about instead of a 3 year old one.
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