Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 Preview By

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 preview By: Steve Boxer Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 It’s no secret that this has been a pretty horrendous year for Tiger Woods, but the iconic golfer can at least take comfort from one thing: the latest version of the game that bears his name. The world’s favourite golf game has had a pretty substantial makeover, with a host of new features and tweaks, the overall effect being to make it even more infernally addictive than before. You’ll notice one thing even before you unwrap its box: for the first time, Tiger isn’t on his own on the cover, but instead he shares it with Rory McIlroy, the 21-year-old Northern Irish hotshot who is increasingly being hailed as the “new Tiger”. There’s method in having a European and an American on the cover, as one of the most exciting aspects of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 is that it contains the Ryder Cup, due to take place this October at the Celtic Manor course in Wales. Anyone with even the merest passing interest in golf will salivate at the prospect of enacting a virtual Ryder Cup, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 really puts you at the helm of the USA versus Europe matchplay competition. You can play at being Monty, by selecting your team, and jump into any of the matches, even if you’re playing as yourself. If you leave the default settings and opt to play for Europe, you’ll be teamed up with McIlroy, against Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk – a daunting prospect, so you’ll have to be bang on your game. And you can set up online Ryder Cups, with two teams of twelve people. Are you experienced? A key (and, thankfully, easily grasped) new aspect of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 is the introduction of an RPG element, via Experience Points (XP), which let you upgrade your golfing attributes with an astonishing degree of control over fine detail. You earn XP for things like hitting greens and fairways in regulation, nailing birdies and eagles and so on. But the quickest route to levels of XP sufficient to have a major effect on your golfing skills is to play Skills Challenges. As you would expect, these are specific challenges, in which you compete against pro golfers. Thus, you might have to beat Suzann Pettersen (noted for the length of her driving) in matchplay over a series of par-fives, or match Boo Weekley for accuracy and spin around the greens. In other words, they’re not easy, and the more Challenges you win, the harder they come. But each one unlocks a fistful of XP, which you can then cash in on various aspects of your swing (including swing speed and power-boost, draw, fade and swing plane, putting feel and so on). Pumping up the Green Reading attribute, for example, will make the putting green grid finer. You can even select Swing Tuner, make detailed changes to your swing and try them out on the practice range. Focus wisely Also new – and in keeping with the concept of XP – is Focus. Visible as a red bar in the icon that shows your swing, Focus can be spent on tweaking your shots – by, for example, adding a Power Boost to your drives, adding directional spin while your ball is in the air or using the (very handy) Putt Preview. But you have to be careful: every time you perform one of those actions, your Focus depletes (although it does build back up slowly over the course of a few holes). And for those craving all the realism Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 can muster (which is an awful lot, given that graphical rendition of the grass, skies and so on have been improved in comparison with previous games), there is True Aim. This gives you more of a golfer’s-eye view: you have to aim and select your club after seeing a GPS view of each hole studded with distance markers, and once you hit your shot, you will get the same view as you would on a real golf course (except with a blue trail added to your ball). Subtle but effective tweaks Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 contains a whole bunch of under-the-bonnet improvements that you won’t necessarily become instantly aware of, but which do make a difference to how it plays. There’s variable wind, for example, which means you have to pay attention to the wind indicator before every shot. The greens are harder and more realistic, a new variable percentage system makes hitting out of the rough more of a lottery (which motivates you to hit those fairways in regulation). Your ball now won’t necessarily land dead centre in your shot-aiming circle, either, and the backswing power degradation has been changed, so that, for example, if you want to hit three- quarter-strength shots, it’s all down to your dexterity on the downswing (as, indeed, it should be). Combine all that, and you get the most convincing, realistic golf game ever. If you’re already getting excited about the Ryder Cup, make sure you snap up a copy – the sheer joy you’ll derive from operating as a virtual Monty, not to mention any of his players, will more than keep you going until golf’s most prestigious matchplay circus reaches Celtic Manor. .

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