When you think of a golf video game, the name of Tiger Woods instantly comes to mind. From the early 90s the PGA Tour series has always had a worthy challenge for the golf video game crown. Now with that said there have also been plenty of quick cash-ins games that were just looking for a quick buck. Has another worthy challenger appeared for PGA Tour or is this just another celebrity endorsing an subpar game for the cash payoff.

One of the more prominent things on the game’s cover is its advertised support for the new PlayStation Move so I’ll talk about that first. The Move support I have to say feels like an afterthought that was just added in at the last minute. From what I can tell all O-Games did was take the Dual Shock 3 controls and mapped gestures to simulate it with the PlayStation Move. The game was definitely not designed from the ground up to use the Move and there are problems because of it. Swinging with a club works okay, it doesn’t really capture your movements to any large degree but the basic swing feels somewhat authentic. Though one thing that annoys me is that when using the Move I couldn’t find a way so you could see your character from the 3rd person when you swing, you always have to swing from the 1st person with your character is looking down at the ball, which gets pretty annoying. Where the Move controls really start to fall apart is with the putting, which has little semblance to the actual action. When you try to putt your ball, to make any sort of distance you have exaggerate your swing so much it ends up looking more like a full on drive than an actual putt. To summarize, if you came looking for the ultimate golf motion controller experience, you won’t find it here.

Now for the less exciting part of the control scheme options, playing with your standard run of the mill Dual Shock 3 setup. Like I hinted in the last paragraph, using the standard controller is a lot similar to the Move except instead of making gestures you’re using the analog stick to do the same exact thing. The controls feel more exact than the Move equivalents but not dramatically so. The problem is there just doesn’t seem to be much to it and if you get the hang of connecting the percentages on the bar with how far your swing will go then you’ll be able to master the game fairly quickly. The game doesn’t really bring anything new to the table and it keeps the gameplay really basic. This is all the stuff that have already been done in better golf games.

Speaking of really basic, the graphics really don’t have much to them. The environments don’t have much detail to them. It looks like no effort was made to try and make it look the least bit realistic, the trees look blocky, the grass looks like a green blob. The same can be said for the character models which looks like a Hot Shots Golf cartoony character when the game is seemingly try to go for the realistic look. In fact I’d go as far to say this feels like a PS2 game that was just upconverted to run on a current generation console.

The game modes are kept to the bare minimums for it to be still be called a golf game. You ‘ve got match play, stroke play and you can have up to four players in your quick match mode. This is fine and good if there was a substantial campaign mode but there really isn’t. The game let’s you play in tournaments once you’ve defeated John Daly in a series of boring golf range, getting to the green and putting challenges. In fact while doing this you have John Daly making dumb comments that can’t help but remind of the purposely-bad fictional golf game from The Simpson’s “Lee Carvello’s Putting Challenge” with it’s star speaking except this game is supposed to be good. Once you best John Daly in these challenges you can participate in some boring tournaments that takes places in a dozen golf courses. There is nothing there to make you keep coming back unless you’re golf die-hard. One thing that especially stood out was to compensate for the budget pricing the game had placed automobile ads in the game to make some extra cash that stood out like a swore thumb. The game does have an online mode but I was unable to play it since nobody was actually online looking for a match all the times I checked.

The game doesn’t have much in the lines of music except when the game is showing off the poorly detailed courses but it didn’t get on my nerves the few times I heard it. The commentary gets extremely repetitive really quickly and it won’t be long before it’ll be grating on your nerves. The fact the game uses as far I can tell real goal announcers does nothing to improve the experience. I was left wishing the sound effects were louder since they were a lot less annoying.

If you’ve skipped to the end of the review to get my summary I’ll make it brief. Don’t get this golf games unless you really want to swing a fake golf club and can’t wait for a better game to go on sale for a cheaper price. While the current budget price makes it easier to swallow I’d still be far away from recommending this game to anyone except golf die-hards, but then they’ve got better games to choose from if you are. As my dad said when I had him play it with me “Do we have to continue playing” and I said “No”.

Gameplay

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