Review by: William Abner

The Tiger Woods PGA series on the Xbox 360 is a frustrating animal. On the one hand you have a plethora of beautiful courses, believable physics, and loads of game options that should, on paper, keep golf fans happy for months on end, but the game forces you to jump through too many hoops for the payoff and as a result continues to underachieve, so while the new features in Tiger 11 are significant, they are not allowed to reach their potential because the design hamstrings the experience.

For example, the offline game where you build your PGA Tour Pro from scratch is at times exhilarating and at other times maddeningly silly. Upon starting your career you take part in the game’s quick tutorial mode, which shows you the basics of some of the game’s new features such as “XP” – this is your basic role-playing game experience point system where you earn points for performing tasks like hitting fairways and greens in regulation or sinking birdies and eagles.

The new “Focus” system is also on display; this is going to make casual virtual golfers happy but will make real golfers and sim fanatics cringe. It’s a very “gamey” device which allows you to manually add distance to shots by quickly pressing the A button on your backswing, shrink your target circle, automatically read greens via the putt preview and magically put spin on the ball before it lands on the green. It doesn’t turn your golfer into a robot Jack Nicklaus but it does come off hokey. Thankfully you only have so much “Focus” stored up during a round so it’s not in unlimited supply.

After you finish your quick tour of various shot types you are allowed to spend your XP. It is at this point where you realize that your virtual golfing avatar has the ability of the last man picked in a 4-man weekend scramble. Worst of all, you’re now on your own on the PGA Tour.

This is where the strange design decisions start to come into play. To give you an idea of just how awful your golfer is at the start of career mode, Tiger Woods is rated in the 90s across the board in the various basic skill categories (power, accuracy, control, putting). You, on the other hand, are a 10. Your drives will be in the 220 yard range. I started playing golf on a regular basis in the 7th grade. By the 9th grade I was driving the ball around 220 off the tee. Yet your PGA Tour golfer, who is playing against pros blasting it 300+ yards, hits like the colorfully dressed grandmothers in Caddyshack.