Despite EA’s claims to have overhauled the game’s (previously lame) presentation, too often even great shots like these pass entirely unnoticed by the broadcast team, which is deflating.
The commentary is still sparse and unenthusiastic, with huge chunks of speech clips from previous years making a return, such as the ‘We now have a new leader’ pronouncement if you take the lead, spoken with about as much enthusiasm by Jim Nantz as if he’d just walked into your kitchen and told you he’d just stepped into a pile of crap.
Generally speaking, the commentary is as lamentable as it has always been; a factor that has always dragged down the precious ‘Metascore’ for EA, and yet they mystifyingly continue to treat it as a low priority.
After the somewhat sad, solitary affair of qualifying in complete silence, the commentary from Nantz and Feherty kicks in, but it’s so phoned in EA doesn’t even bother to mention the pair in their press releases or on the game’s website.
You start your career qualifying in either an American or British tournament and, happily, can practice first or choose to skip that part and go straight to the ‘final round’. That’s a good innovation – as is the excellent comparison meter that quickly and easily compares new equipment with what you’ve already equipped so that you can see at a glance whether it’s worth making the trade.
You also earn ‘coins’ as you play, use these coins to buy ‘pin packs’, then use the pin packs to boost your golfer’s performance.
The big new mode this year is ‘Connected Tournaments,’ though, where you can play at the same time as up to 23 other gamers, with their shots represented in real time as shot arcs on your screen.
When this works, there’s a feeling of being in a tournament with other real people, but good luck finding tournaments run in Australia, and even if you do, you may find you ‘don’t own this course’ and get booted back out.
You can set up your own ‘Country Club’ – a clan, essentially, in first-person shooter land – and go to EA Sports’ website to set up your own, private tournaments for members of your new club. We have yet to make that part work though, as Origin repeatedly fails to email us our forgotten password, and, anyway, since none of our friends are playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, our sparkly new Country Club has a stellar membership of 1.
Or maybe the big new mode is the ‘Legends of the Majors’ experience, where you work your way through challenges from ‘yesteryear’, unlocking a new challenge if you win the preceding one.
The structure is very familiar, the color palette is sepia and there are some nice touches regarding the clothing, naming of the clubs and even a ‘new, old’ logo for the replays, but essentially this mode is just a clever reskin of the ‘Legacy Challenge’ mode in last year’s game or the ‘Masters Moments’ mode the year before that.
There are a lot of challenges here (62, in fact) but they all amount to exactly the same thing: play good golf. There are also some strange anachronisms, too, such as players from the 19th century doing fist pumps after a good putt. EA Sports’ research is only skin deep, apparently.
The perennial discussion around EA Sports’ games is if it’s worth paying each year for what usually amounts to a re-skinning of the previous year’s game with updated rosters and a heap of cosmetic changes.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 doesn’t do anything to help EA’s case in this regard, and then compounds the error by spending too much time trying to force logos and fancy screen elements into the game, like the infuriating pop-up info boxes that so often obscure your view of the shot.
The usual grabby monetization goading isn’t as overt this time, which is a blessing, and if you can sift through the mountain of superfluous polish and guff there’s a decent game of golf to be had, but the core playing experience is so flat and unappealing that it’s really hard to get excited about it at all.
