Review of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006

This game, especially now that the original Xbox game is $29.95, is complete robbery. The Xbox 360 version sports only 6 courses compared to the 11 courses on the original Xbox and this version is filled to the brim with bugs.

For example, when playing a tournament, on the final hole, the putting line will mysteriously disappear (this actually happens countless times throughout the game, but interestingly enough, I've noticed it appears most often when you're about to finish a round). Also, as you make your last putt, the announcers will often say "That's a tie atop the leaderboard!" or "That's for a share of the lead." when you've actually won the tournament. Announcements will also come late, for example, when you're putting and the announcer calls out that you're 170 yards from the hole. Top that off with the fact that their putting advice isn't just useless, it's often totally wrong.

The online version of this game is using EA's own front-end, as they have in the previous TW games. If you haven't experienced how bad it is, consider yourself lucky. Game drop-outs (which are tallied on your personal Xbox profile) are far more likely EA's fault then a sour player. EA even taunts us by directly telling us that the only way they're going to update their 4-question online FAQ is if we send them a question "wrapped in cash preferably twenties."

EA has never offered additional courses for download. There is no "download" menu item in the Xbox Live menu of this game, and I will personally fly to EA and buy every member of the TW06 team a copy of this over-priced, over-rated game, if they ever offer even a single course. It simply won't happen because they don't care.

This game has a "fall-behind, catch up" feature, so bad that, if you're winning the tournament, Tiger Woods will come out of no-where on the 3rd day and score an impossible round. For example, he shot a hole-in-zero (yes, you read that correctly) on a par 3 to catch up to me on the back nine. He'll also take the lead in the tournament. The reason this is done is so that you can do "head to head" against Tiger. However, it also ruins any course records you've worked hard (and fairly) to earn.

The final nail in this game's coffin is that the system "cheats." And by that, I mean that the controls on the system will mysteriously pull (left or right) or push (over the green) your shots when you're too far in the lead, or making an early gain at the beginning of the higher tournaments. If you want an example, try making the exact same eagle approach shot in one of the major tournaments when you're ahead and behind. If you're the leader, you won't ever hit the green, if you're the leader, you'll never hit the green, if you're a few shots behind, you'll -amazingly- land near the pin.

For the price of this game, you should really go out and play a real round of golf. You won't be giving lazy developers any of your hard earned money and you'll be playing at a far nicer course than EA has virtually created.



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