Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat; I am a huge fan of golf games, but I am not a fan of golf. Augusta holds no special power over me. I don't care what colour my jacket it. So from that perspective, EA's latest offering in the Tiger Woods PGA tour franchise is a respectable effort, that comes up short in many ways.

At it's core Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters is still the same capable golf game with minor improvements over last year's offering. Most notable this year is the ability to choke down on your swing to either 1/2 or full to take some distance off while still swinging at 100% power. It's a helpful addition for those times where you're between clubs, as choking up and still swinging at 100% is easier than trying to swing at an odd percentage. Putting also will take a bit of getting used to, as strokes in this year's version seem to be a bit stronger compared to years past.

Annoying, thy name is Caddy. 

The other major gameplay additions is also one of the game's greatest flaws. You now have a caddy who will usually present you a few options, which are effectively preset shots that you just need to swing at the correct percentages to hit. For new players, at first glance it's a welcome option, since learning to setup shots accounting for wind, height differences and ball lie can be daunting. However, most players will soon see that the caddy reccomendations are not always optimal (sometimes he won't even have a reccomended shot) which leaves those players twisting in the wind without any idea how to account for various factors when needing to setup their own shot. For players with any kind of exposure to the series, the caddy is an enormous drawback, due to the fact that you can end up in much better position by setting up a custom shot. You can "disable" the caddy, by pressing "B" however all that does is default to the "custom" shot mode, which usually has your aiming marker off in the bushes somewhere, requiring you to spend time moving the marker over the the fairway. It doesn't sound like much of an annoyance, until you do it for the 100th time. And the caddy is nothing but a littany of small annoyances. He has an unskippable animation before every shot, slowing the game down considerably. His dialogue can be repetitive at times. On most difficulties the caddy will place a giant glowing circle on the green when putting, however his green reading is suspect at best, and more often than not, putting the marker somewhere within his reccomendation is an excellent way to miss a putt. The problem is that there is no way to disable these giant glowing distracting circles and oftentimes you'll end up second-guessing your own line when it's relatively close to what the caddy is suggesting. The caddy will also try to screw up your putts with lines of spoken dialogue "Play it with no break, and hit it past the hole" is one of my favourites, because if you do exactly that, you often end up missing to the left or right by a few inches. The announcers try to give far too much credit to your caddy as well. Lines that should be congragulating you specifically instead read "They made an amazing shot there, they should be really pleased". There is never a mention of you specifically, only references to the "team" of you and your sidekick.

Interface, shminterface 

Unfortunately Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters suffers from a host of annoying interface decisions both in-game, and on the menus. In-game you now have to push LS forward to view the target area, this is made even more annoying due to the fact that you cannot pull LS back to snap back to your golfer. This is because LS controls the camera in that view. A camera that, by default, is not at an accecptable zoom for viewing where your ball will land before rolling to the target area, and also has a nasty habit of getting caught on trees and scenery as you rotate it around the target area. At first I thought it wasn't able to move more than a few degrees behind the ball until I found that you could zoom in, rotate the camera, and then zoom out. The camera also 'travels' much to fast to the target area, which means it's impossible to see any course features and hazards along the path of your shot. Lie information is now viewed by pulling back on LS which presents you a screen consisting only of your ball and the lie information (slope, how much your shot power will be impacted). Unfortunately this information isn't avaiable to you while you're actually aiming your shot. So you either end up adding a significant amount of time to setting up your shot (waiting for the camera to zoom in, then out on your ball) or ignoring lie information a significant amount of the time. I appreciate the desire to show off the SpeedGrass technology, but not making that information accessible elsewhere is a large annoyance. The actual menu design is also extremely cumbersome. I initially thought that they had removed the ability to post clips online, because the method for posting them was buried under Main Menu -> Quick Play -> Xbox LIVE -> EA Sports GamerNet -> Saved Shots -> Create GamerNet Highlight. While you are on the "career" mode of the road to the masters, you will also see a list of events presented to you. Only one of these events will be unlocked at any given time, even though if you scroll over the locked ones it informs you that you meet all the critera for playing in that event. What it doesn't tell you that the events are arranged in a calendar format, with no mention of the dates whatsoever which simply adds to the confusion.  Another issue is that the game constantly assumes the player is intimately familiar with the game of golf. One sponsor challenge asks the player to win 2 Majors, however during the 25 game season, there's no indication whatsoever which events are Majors. It should not be required that the player google esoteric golf knowledge when it would be trivial to add it in-game.

Multi-player? If "Multi" means 4, sure. 

Online play is largely the same and works rather well, provided you don't want to play with any more than 3 other people. There is a "Rider Cup" mode, that will support 10 people, but it simply plays as 5 individual match-play games. Worse still, after you finish your match against your opponent, you're unceremoniously booted back to the main menu, without being able to see which side actually won your tournament. The lack of any ability to set up a custom online tournament is also disappointing.

There is nothing game-breakingly wrong with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters, however a laundry list of annoyances will leave you wondering why you didn't just keep playing 10.