PixlBit

Yeah, I’ve golfed. Once. Does that make me qualified to critique a modern realistic golf game? You betcha! My sole golf outing was in high school with several people who knew their way around the fairways. What started off fun and with a lot of potential quickly turned to a disaster as the hours wore on. Balls were lost, tempers flared, and the idiot driving the golf cart I was in crashed into a brick pillar throwing me forward, stopping only when my shins slammed into the sharp dashboard of the cart. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14: Masters Historic Edition has lots of similarities to that fateful golf outing, and I’m hoping to keep someone else from getting plowed into a brick column.

Things start off looking poorly when you boot up this seventy dollar(!) game and the resolution is immediately downgraded to 720p. It must be pretty tough for developers to get the resolution up to expected standards by the time they’ve released the eighth entry on the PlayStation 3. As someone who rarely plays sports games, this visual downgrade made me wonder if there was truth to the oft-heard criticisms that annualized sports games are just churned out to make a few bucks from habitual buyers. It was the first indicator of many that this is clearly what’s going on, which is unfortunate. The tried and true basic mechanics of the actual golfing are marred by irritating technical issues and cash grabs every step through the menus and almost every time you head out on the course.

Let me reiterate that the actual golfing is quite enjoyable and I wanted to play more rounds and more holes even though there were continuous irritants. The tutorials do a good job of teaching you how to perform the different shots and what the various indicators mean (with a few exceptions, like why your controller rumbles during a swing). After a few short lessons and a little practice, I was able to turn in some adequate score cards. Each of the rounds I played was genuinely fun – at least the golf parts were. Again, it’s the rest of the garbage keeping you from actual golf that’s the issue.

Once you recover from that initial slap in the face of the game only being in 720p, you’re quickly faced with more annoyances. The game has to log on to EA’s servers when you start a session, which isn’t a snappy process, and you’ll also encounter frequent loading times that are also far from fast. In fact, between every hole on the course you’re stuck waiting for the next hole to load – leaving you with nothing to do but look at the random statistics about your golfing while you wait. You’ll have plenty of time to digest whatever numbers they put in front of you and even time enough to start wondering why you really care about the lifetime eagle leader board among your club.

The between-hole interludes also feature the occasional voice over from the recorded announcers, which makes the waiting even more painful. When the announcers chime in on the loading screens or during actual golfing, it becomes very clear that real care to the presentation was not a priority when Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 was created. The announcers have very few phrases, and when they pipe up it’s almost as if you can hear them clicking on a microphone to create a jarring, unexpected vocal blurb. Additionally, most of what they say is awkwardly unnatural, such as: “Let’s see how the golfers are progressing thus far.”

While there have been problems with voiceovers in sports games before, the real personality problem in this game comes in the form of poorly rendered athletes. These fellas have fallen deep into the uncanny valley with nary a rope ladder around to attempt an escape. Their soulless eyes peering out from plastic masks are the only thing distracting you from the inexplicable presence of moobs on Tiger Woods.

Only the characters in the special historic rounds available in this fancy edition of the game are somewhat not creepy, and they only look more acceptable because they are behind scratchy sepia filters to make the world look just like it did back then. (The world used to be brown and scratchy, right?) If you fork over the extra bucks for this edition of the game, the bonus olden tyme rounds are pretty fun, despite the silly aged look. You’re given the actual equipment of the time on courses as they were and get to try to match or outplay actual historic golf rounds through history. This makes for a pretty cool extra bit of content for the person who buys this game annually or wants to really spend endless hours playing virtual golf. If you’ve already resigned yourself to spending the usual sixty dollars on another vanilla edition of Tiger Woods, you might as well splurge and get this content for an extra ten bucks.

Unless, of course, you want to save your money for the bountiful add-on content available in the game. There is so much additional crud you can pay actual American dollars for; you would think it’s the latest free-to-play title smoking up the iTunes app charts. Sadly, remember that this is a seventy dollar product that is begging you to send even more cash in EA’s direction. You’ll be offered upgrades to your custom golfers, the chance to buy more skill-boosting pins, and be allowed to pay to unlock additional golf courses around the world. Many of those extra courses are required to take part in online tournaments too. You won’t know you don’t own a necessary course, though, until you click through multiple menus and finally press the button to start the game and get an error message. A small flag on events you can actually participate in with your available golf courses would be a great way to recognize that paying customers have better things to do than click through endless menus to see if they can play part of the game they paid for.

When you can play in those online tournaments, and against other humans in live rounds, it’s a fun experience. You’ll still face all of the frustrating loading issues and goofball graphics and sound, but it’s a good time overall. Whenever I tried to focus on the positive parts and accept that the game is asking me for cash, trying to show me random product advertisements on the menu screen, and not a highly polished technical masterpiece, it still found new ways to make me angry. Multiple times, my golfer got stuck in practice swing mode that required me to quit a round (and lose the skill-boosting pins I had equipped). I also lost contact with the EA server and had to sit there idle while the game tried to reconnect – which was pointless since I was just playing locally by myself and had no need to be in contact with any sort of server.

It’s all extremely frustrating to experience. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 (and it’s Masters Historic Edition extra content)  has a foundation of golf simulation that is engaging, takes practice to perfect, and can lead to fun times online and off, but there are so many technical issues and stupid cash grabs going on that I can’t help to come away annoyed. EA doesn’t seem to have much respect for some of its most loyal customers (the annual sports game purchasers) by releasing a game with all of these problems and extra trash, and that’s a shame. If each annual installment de-creepified the golfers a little, shortened the load times, and didn’t pass the virtual hat around, then this could be a great game that everyone should consider trying. As it is, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 is only for those who can’t stop from buying these things annually, or for those savvy enough to wait a couple of years and buy it for five bucks in the clearance bin – when it will be essentially identical to the brand new Tiger Woods PGA Tour 16 on the shelves.