Grab Your Wood And Whack Your Balls. No Its Not Meant To Be Sick.
I played this game with my Godfather Adam.
No, no, no. This is not the way to make a golf game. Swing Away Golf beats this game by a mile, and I'll tell you why later in this review. This is the first PS2 game in which El Tigre (Tiger in Spanish) has teed it up. And, like he has nowadays, he's missed the fairway by a mile. Let's take a look at what EA has in store for us this time.
Gameplay : While the last section came up short like Phil Mickelson in a major, this one collapses like Jean Van de Velde in the British Open . The swing system looks promising on paper, but it really is not good. The swing system strays from the traditional 3-click system used in all other golf games and uses a real-time analog swing system. It's really like using a track ball on the Golden Tee arcade games: you push the left analog stick back to bring the club back, and push it forward to swing through the ball. Now this is where it gets frustrating: you could hit a perfect shot, and you'd still come up short or long or whatever. It's too easy to slice or hook the ball, and even though you can adjust the spin of the ball in mid-flight, you never get the spin you want.
This gameplay system was new for 2001, but it still needs tweaking to be perfect. A little advice to EA: next year, at least give us the chance to work the ball better.
Graphics : Visuals are absolutely stunning in this game. The PS2 needed some pretty-looking launch titles to establish itself as a graphically strong platform, and it did just that with games like this and Madden 2001, another PS2 launch title. You can see just about everything, including the grooves on the Nike driver that Tiger uses. Heck, for that matter, you can even see the Nike "swish" logo! Tiger's face looks very close to it's real-life counterpart, as do all the other pros. Very solid here from EA.
Your only objective here is to whoop the other PGA Tour player's butts in Career mode or other modes like Skins and Match Play.
Sound : The downward slide starts here. There is nothing much to be had in the music department unless you like listening to random music on the menu screens. Sounds are as accurate to the real thing as possible, but only hearing Tiger saying "release!" and "come on, take off!" when you add topspin or "bite!" when you add backspin is just annoying. I can hear Tiger's voice every week at a press conference or on the course.
This section is very important to me in a golf game, and it fails to even remotely impress. The only 3 courses you have in the game are all part of the Pebble Beach trio of courses. Namely, you have Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill, and Poppy Hill. Pebble Beach is a good course, but nobody plays a PGA Tour event on Spyglass Hill or Poppy Hill unless it's the Pebble Beach Pro-Am at the beginning of every season. EA could have spent less time on the visuals and more time on designing courses (real ones, preferably) to make the game more enjoyable, but nope! They had to stick us with a gameplay system as shoddy as Nike's golf clubs and a Tiger with a limited vocabulary that non-golfers will not understand. EA's logic never ceases to puzzle me.
You can't have fun if you keep on getting stiffed on perfect shots you made that didn't reach the green! No shots on green=no birdie chances.
Unless you like beating up on players over and over again with nothing much to show for it, then this is not a game with a lot of replay value at all.