The latest version of the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series gets a lot right, a lot wrong, and in the end needed another month or two of development time in order to justify the full $60 price tag.

The good news for long time fans is that this new version is more difficult than last year’s game. This is significant because good players would consistently shoot rounds in the high 50s and low 60s on a routine basis in Tiger ’07 and the fact that the challenge, even on the lower levels, has been ramped up a bit is a welcome change. You’re going to earn that mid 60s score this year. Part of the reason for this change is because the analog swing model is more sensitive so a slight miss-hit now produces a wicked slice or hook rather than a simple fade or draw.

You need a modicum of patience before jumping in with both feet— Tiger Woods 08 demands that you truly learn how to play and not just grip it and rip it. While some might gripe at the added challenge, it’s always better to make things a bit more difficult than boringly easy, which was the case last year. You need the challenge for long term playability. In addition, once your avatar earns a lot of skill points the degree of difficult goes down quite a bit; it’s just tough to start off shooting 10-under par.

While the actual swing mechanics are as good as ever, the “new” features don’t inspire you to do the Tiger fist pump. The new Face in the Game bit, where you can easily import photos of yourself to use in the game, is actually surprisingly cool—if you can get it to work. EA Sports World, the server you need to upload photos, works about half the time. The same goes for the new GamerNet feature, where you can upload your best shots and try to have other Tiger players top it. This feature again works about half the time because of server issues and even when it does work, it feels more like a feature for those who are simply bored out of their minds—honestly what is the draw for trying to beat the score if JoeMama42’s 9-iron approach on the 18th at Pebble?

This would be fine for an off the cuff feature, but these are two of the “big” features for Tiger Woods 08. When the base design of the game is still screwed up, you’d think, EA would focus its attention on that instead of feature glut.

For instance, the “career” portion of the game isn’t what you’d expect. The game forces you to work for your career fun. Want to create a golfer, give him some attributes, maybe slap your face on him and head out to the Tour? Slow down there, partner. You need to get your skills high enough to compete before playing in a tournament. That means taking part in the Skills Training and Tiger Challenge!

The Skills Training is mind numbing. Look, we all need practice with this year’s added difficulty but forcing you to do these silly mini-games in order to boost your skills is just asinine. It’s the same with the Tiger Challenge. This mode might be a blast for some, but for others the idea of playing a 3-hole match of Bingo, Bango, Bongo is not their idea of golf nirvana. . In addition, the “Concede Hole” button is gone—last year you could at least move things along by quitting on a hole that was a lost cause. Not this year. The game forces you to finish every hole even if you have no chance after driving out of bounds or going in the drink on your approach.

What about just playing …golf? Sure, you can create your player and enter a tourney, but your skills will be so low that you cannot compete with the Pros. You literally need to boost your skills before playing in a 4-day event and it takes hours before you’re at that level. Literally—hours.