Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005 Hands-On

The last time we saw Gameloft's golf title--about six months ago at E3--it was called Real Golf, and it hadn't even made it out of early alpha. Since then, the linchpin of Gameloft's evolving sports catalog has gained an important license and received a complete interface overhaul, emerging from its development chrysalis as Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005. Gameloft has also polished up the game's presentation nicely and added a few unique competitive angles to the experience. If the developer continues to work at it, Vijay Singh may soon be mentioned in the same breath as Tiger Woods, Jamdat Golf, and Golden Tee.

In many ways, Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005 will offer mobile mulligan men (and women) a comfortably familiar golfing experience for their cell. You'll have a posterior viewpoint for shots, an overhead map to plot out your next move, and a directional arrow to indicate wind strength. The game uses a somewhat less-common lateral meter to control the strength of your shots, but the underlying mechanic is familiar. You can plan your shot using the intuitive map menu, which smoothly displays shot arc, or in the golfer view, which is more realistic but works at a slower pace. Once you get everything set up, your swing meter will be marked with a suggested stopping point that is generally quite accurate--although you should manually adjust for wind direction, lie, club, and so forth. When it comes time to putt, Pro Golf displays a rainbow-colored grid to help you discern the green's break.

Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005's basic mechanics are certainly competent, but they don't stray too far from the beaten path. Instead, the game's novelty lies in its variety of competitive modes. If you choose to play a quick game, you'll be dropped off on the links playing as Singh himself. Otherwise, you'll choose from one of five premade golfers, all of whom have different statistics for power, accuracy, approach, and putting. At this stage in development, it doesn't seem as though you can customize your golfer or improve his statistics, but the five default choices still cover a wide range of playing styles. Once you pick, you can put your country-club avatar through the paces in a tournament, or pit him against Singh in versus play. There are two ways to try Singh: match play, which tallies how many times you can best the Fijian phenom on a hole-by-hole basis, and stroke play, which is a standard round of golf. If you manage to beat Singh in either instance, you'll unlock him as a playable character in that particular mode.

Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005 is already fairly accomplished in its presentation, although it could use some optimizing before final release. The game's animations and backgrounds are clean and functional, and the map mode is one of the best we've seen in a mobile golf game--balls hook and slice very realistically, and the camera follows the path of the ball perfectly. There are occasional performance issues in the Series 60 Java version of the game, but these will likely be resolved with more development time.

Our overall impression of Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005 is cautiously optimistic. Gameloft has a real chance to break into a new genre with a bang--provided that it buckles down on this game in the last month or two of development. We'll have a review as soon as the final version becomes available.