Also new to Tiger Woods ‘08 is the confidence system, which tracks your success at various shots in various situations to provide you with a confidence meter for any given situation. If you’ve traditionally done well at a particular shot you’ll have high confidence and continue to do well. Having low confidence is supposed to provide heart beat sounds and mess with the Wiimote, however over the course of the game, the confidence meter never seems to have any impact on gameplay. Shots with low confidence ratings are completed with the same level of success as shots with high confidence ratings meaning that either the system doesn’t work, or your golfer has steely resolve in the face of continued incompetence.
Tiger Woods ‘08 has the same attribute building system as ’07, meaning that at the end of each contest you’ll be given experience points to help bring up your stats as well as money to purchase equipment. It’s still not perfect in that you get the most experience points for the things you’re already doing well, making it harder to give your golfer a stat boost where they need it most. Also returning to this year’s iteration is EA’s fantastic GameFace technology, which makes it possible to create a golfer that looks just like you, provided you know your exact cheek to chin ratio. The Photo GameFace mode present in the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions is sadly lacking so those looking for pixel perfect recreations of their visage should look elsewhere. Also missing from this version are any online modes, which is odd, given that Madden ’08 for the Wii, also from EA, has a robust online model.
The game looks exactly like Tiger Woods ’07. Courses are well modeled, and the framerate moves a long nicely, however it’s obvious that EA isn’t making any effort to pretty up Tiger Woods for the Wii. Greens still tear a bit as the camera tracks the ball to them, and there’s no gallery to speak of, even when playing in tournaments.
On the audio front, things aren’t any better. It uses the same commentary, both for course layout tips and color commentary that has been in the game since it first debuted on the GameCube back in 2002. Despite there being no visual evidence of a gallery, there is a fair amount of applause and gallery chatter when you make a particularly nice shot, including someone yelling “I love this game” at nearly every hole as if he were the Rainbow Man of the PGA. None of this detracts from the game; however the recycled commentary only furthers the notion that there’s nothing new here.
“Nothing new here” is the pervading theme in Tiger Woods ‘08. Six months simply isn’t enough time to do more than tighten up some areas of gameplay and model a few courses, which is exactly what EA has done for this version, the only problem being that they expect you to pay full price for these minor upgrades. The problems with the swing and putting mechanics can certainly be overcome, and the game can be enjoyable, however there’s really no reason to pick up the game at full price.
