The accolade of best golf videogame is one of the medium’s most hotly contested. And, perhaps more than any other sport, there are myriad different approaches between the genre’s big hitters: Everybody’s Golf goes for the cutesy, big-headed Japanese look and arcade feel. ProStroke Golf takes the dry, considered sim swing while WiiSports chooses to press a virtual iron into players’ hands and have them physically swing for their win. EA’s Tiger Woods series, the best selling standalone title in the genre, draws elements from each of these other games, perfecting the unique result with incremental yearly tweaks and an ever-increasing landslide of extra features to lose your ball in.

Perhaps the most distinctive trait for the Tiger Woods series is the analogue stick control scheme. By drawing back the left analogue stick your character swings back his or her club in kind. Then, with a deft flick of the thumb you bring the iron down in an arc, controlling power, hook and slice all by the smoothness of your action. It’s been a controversial move for the series – some players complaining that this approach lacks the less realistic but more precise control of the old system (one button click to set a shot’s power on a sliding gauge followed by another timed to dictate accuracy). In response to these criticisms EA has reintroduced the three click shot system (as used in virtually every other pad-based golf game) and players can now choose between the two.

Whoever way you choose to play, with a little practice you should be working your way through courses easily, matching and even coming in under pars with a little concentration. From here the game’s myriad features open up to you. Highlights can now be saved from your single-player game and uploaded to EA’s servers as challenges for other players to take up. A new game face system (allowing you to either take a shot with a usb camera or download an image from the net) personalises your golfer to a frightening degree. There’s also now a new experience-based upgrade system that requires particular shots to be practiced to level up your character’s appropriate statistics and an overhauled put preview system to help you more accurately set those tricky finishing shots.

Despite these generous extra-curricular additions there’s only one new play mode (a head-to-head mode dubbed ‘bingo, bango, bongo’) and so, core gameplay-wise this isn’t a huge step on from the previous title in the series. If you’ve played a Tiger game before every aspect of the in-game play will be comfortably familiar, from the layout of each green to the exact amount of force, pressure and fade you need to perfect each hole. Ultimately, for all the bells and whistles, the meat of the game is a little samey – polished and tweaked for sure, but undeniably familiar. Nevertheless, for a newcomer golf fan this is a must-buy, but for owners of the previous games it’s not quite such a guaranteed hole-in-one.

4 out of 5