Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 2003 brings golf to life on the Mac in a completely 3D world with a brand new course and PGA TOUR golfer line-up. Enhanced True Swing.12 PGA Tour courses and 15 real-life pro golfers.
Readers Review by Phil Chapman
This is a good game which, despite some flaws, I got pretty decent value out of as I still come back to it regularly a year after buying it. The positives include the lovely graphics and fairly realistic physics. The game is entirely 3D and you can zoom around and view the course in any way you want. The game comes with 8 or so courses which is a little disappointing as you soon get to grips with them, but the courses are good ones including St Andrews and Sawgrass. You can change weather conditions to make it wet or dry, windy or still which can make a big difference to how the course plays.
So now to the not so good. There is an interesting Career Mode option which allows you to play a professional golfer working their way up the ranks, winning money to add to their abilities and equipment. This is a nice idea but in my hands I found that the game had an annoying tendency to crash every so often which led to the latest event being lost - annoying when you are winning by 1 stroke on the 18th hole in the final round of a major!! In the end I gave up on this preferring to just play one off games or internet games, although opponents were hard to come by online.
The other flaw with the game is that it is a bit too easy in some respects but impossibly difficult in others. So, it is relatively easy to learn how to hit a perfect strike every time - you 'swing' by sweeping the mouse backwards and forwards in a straight line which is easy if you look at the mouse rather than the screen! However, if you make the settings more difficult to counter this, say by making the greens hard and dry, you can end up with impossible putts akin to playing crazy golf - if you miss the hole the ball rolls back to your feet.
So overall this is a good game but a few critical flaws prevent it being as good as it could have been. If you like golf and/or golf games such as Links it's worth the money. Download the demo and see what you think! Score: 8
Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 2003 brings golf to life on the Mac in a completely 3D world with a brand new course and PGA TOUR golfer line-up. Enhanced True Swing.12 PGA Tour courses and 15 real-life pro golfers.
