Eagle Eye Golf for the PlayStation 2 (known as Enjoy Golf! in Japan) is being brought to the United States by upstart localization and publishing company Aksys Games, and from early impressions it's a good start. The company obviously plans to deliver more games from the Japanese market, but Eagle Eye Golf is it's opening foray into our lucrative market.

While the game is being billed as something in between EA's Tiger Woods games and arcade style golf games, this particular feels more like a refined version of a Hot Shots Golf game. That's not a bad thing for fans that don't find a full blown golf simulation all that appealing in the first place. Eagle Ey Golf is geared mnore towards Hot Shots fans than Tiger Woods fans in the final analysis..

First let's gloss over what this game is going to offer when it is released later this year. Eagle Eye Golf offers a lot of customizable content and lots gameplay adjustements that will provide the proper difficulty curve for gamers of all stripes. For one, players can opt to use premade characters from the start which are pretty well balanced. But if you want to customize the expereince further, you can create your own charcter. Beyond the way your charcter looks, the charcter creation system allows you to spend the expereince points yuou've earned on eight different statisics (control, power, impact, spinshot, recovery, draw, equipment, and fade) that affect how your charcter plays in the game world. This tweaking is interesting for a golf game and does directly affect how things play out as you move forward.

Then there's the gear you can "equip." We won't reveal how you get these little baubles, but as the game progresses you get access to better clubs and balls that improve your showing on the green. This, coupled with the character creation and tweaking, adds a light but role-playing element to the game that's fun.

Finally on the customizable content end of things there's a nice course editor that you can use to create your own golf courses. While the interface for this is a little clunky the editor gets the job done. With a little creative thinking and some elbow grease players can create some fun little courses. The course editor lets you set the par for the hole you are building, place trees, lay out the tee ground, fairway, and the green, manipulate the terrain, and a whole lot more.

The actual gameplay is pretty straightforward and falls somewhere between the aforementioned Hot Shots Golf and the Tiger Woods series from EA. While the game is being billed as something in between arcade and simulation golf, we think its falls more on the arcade side of things.

Eagle Eye Golf is not Hot Shots golf or Tiger Woods, and we think that's a good thing. If we wanted those games we'd be playing them instead. In our early outings with this game we've come to the conclusion that the game is trying to offer a blend of refined arcade golfing mixed with some nice customization and even a dash or role-playing. While we're still on the fence about this game, we're looking forward to giving it a more robust run through when it is released later this month. - James Fudge.