I've been a long-time fan of the Links series on the PC, which is definitely the best golf simulation in existence. However, last year I was pleasantly surprised by how far the Tiger Woods series has come, not particularly because of the gameplay, but because of the features and the presentation. For the 2005 edition, the gameplay is nearly untouched, but what makes the game great is its wealth of modes that'll keep you coming back for more. In that regard, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 doesn't disappoint. With so much to do in the game, I can safely say you'll be playing until next year's installment comes out.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 is best described as a light simulation. It does try to model itself after real-life golf, but various gameplay mechanics reveal the arcadey qualities of the game. For instance, after you hit the ball, you can adjust its spin in mid-air and subsequently affect the way it bounces upon landing. One of the new features is that you can move the ball forward or backward in the stance to alter its trajectory. Moving it forward gives you more loft so that you can hit really soft shots. This is actually a real technique, and it helps you control your shots that much more.

Also, the caddy on the green tells you exactly in what direction and how hard you should hit so you can nail the putt every time. In fact, another one of the new features this year is TigerVision, which acts like a power-up that you can use a limited number of times (up to 4 times) during a match. When you activate it, a yellow dot appears on the putting surface, and you have about 10 seconds to line up your putt on the dot. This guarantees that you'll make the putt, no matter how far away you are or how brutal the slope is.
TigerVision cheapens the game since if you're faced with a pressure putt, you can just activate the bonus and not have to worry about reading the green.

All these features make the game incredibly easy. Scores in the 50s aren't phenomenal feats, they're almost expected. On one hand, this is bound to annoy golf purists like me since Tiger 2005 practically trivializes the sport, but from a gameplay perspective, it's just plain fun. Long Par 5? No problem. I pull out my Nike Ignite 460 cc Driver and crush a 350 yard drive straight down the fairway. Then I line up my 3 wood and knock it over the lake onto the green, where I use Tiger Vision and drain the 30 foot putt with ease. Instant eagle, baby!

Because of this, Tiger 2005 is incredibly accessible for everybody regardless of golf experience. This helps explain why the game is so popular, and believe it or not, it makes for a fun party game since anybody can just pick it up and start hitting great shots. Tiger Woods makes it look easy out on the course, and his game actually does make it easy.

To be fair though, I'm pleased that EA has included Tour Mode difficulty this year, which tries to turn the game into more of a simulation. The putting caddy is gone, and you can't add spin to shots while hitting out of the rough. However, Tour Mode inexplicably allows for after-shot spin control as well as Tiger Vision. If you want a challenge, make sure to toggle all of this off. Even with this difficulty enabled though, the game is still quite forgiving when it comes to the actual swing. But it's a great addition, and I'm confident they can tweak it right next year so that the game actually does play more like a sim.

What sets Tiger 2005 miles apart from any other golf game is its mind-boggling abundance of features. There is a huge emphasis on customization. Let's start with the Pro Shop, which is what the game revolves around. Everything you do in the game rewards you with cash, which you can spend at the Shop to buy literally thousands of items from new clubs, clothing, and jewelry to new celebrations and negative reactions. Everything is licensed too, which means that you can buy a virtual set of those shiny Callaway Big Bertha '04 Irons you've been eying in real life. It's incredibly fun to earn big cash after winning a tournament and come back to the shop to blow it all on new clubs as well as a new outfit. Unlocking these goodies never gets tedious, and there's so much stuff in here that, as I've said before, you can realistically play this all the way until Tiger 2006.

Last year, I called Game Face the best create-a-player I've ever seen, and astoundingly, it gets even better this year. Game Face II is even more detailed, letting you tweak every minutiae of your custom creator. You can go completely crazy with muscle mass, bone structure, lip size, uni brows, you name it. If you are willing to spend the time looking at yourself in the mirror, you can create an eerily accurate digital version of yourself. My only problem is that there still isn't enough variety of hairstyles to choose from. What I want to see for next year is an editor that lets you cut your own hair. How awesome would that be?

Game Face II goes a step further from last year and now lets you create your own swing. Again, you can practice in front of the mirror and get your personal swing into the game, or you can create a completely crazy swing that would possibly snap your spinal cord in real life. After you've finished creating your character with all this customization, you really connect with the person, which just makes playing through the game that much more meaningful.

The customization craze continues with TigerProofing, the biggest feature of this game. "Tiger-proofing" is actually a real-life term, since the introduction of Tiger Woods and players like him completely changed the sport. Tiger's devastatingly long and accurate drives humiliated world-renowned golf courses, and designers had to narrow the fairways, grow out the rough, and lengthen holes to counter Tiger's power game. And that's pretty much what you get to do in this mode: play the part of a course designer. It's not a true custom course mode since you can't create any courses from scratch. Instead, you pick and choose any of the holes from the 14 courses in the game (11 of which are brand new) and totally customize them to create your own 18-hole dream course. There are a variety of adjustments you can make, such as deepening bunkers, adding trees, and tightening fairways, and you can also completely change the color scheme of the holes as well, such as turning the rough blue and the green red. It's a pretty neat feature, but it's certainly no custom course creator. Hopefully that will come next year.

Behind all this customization lies the real meat of the game: My Legend pursuit, which replaces World Tour from last year's game. Your goal is to make your way through the mode to challenge golf legends like Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Tiger Woods, but standing before them are a host of players who you have to defeat first. They're a nice combination of real PGA pros like Vijay Singh and Jim Furyk and custom characters with heavy personality. It's fun stuff, and you get to tackle all the courses and meet all the players in the game. Before each match, you can even bet on yourself so that you get even more money when you win. Accompanying this are the Legend scenarios, similar to last year's mode where you have to fulfill challenges around the course. There's also a Hall of Legends, which is like the Crib mode in ESPN NFL2K5 that lets you walk around the rooms, admiring trophies you've earned and learning about the Legends in the game.

That's the main mode, but everything else from last year's game is back. There's a career mode where you tackle the actual PGA Tour seasons for 10 straight years. Real Time Event returns, a mode based off the internal clock that triggers special events scattered throughout the year. Winning these events rewards you with exclusive goodies in the Pro Shop. Besides this are all the traditional modes that you can play for fun, including match play, skins, stableford, best ball, fourball, battlegolf, minigames, on and on. If you can't tell already, there's a ton of gaming to be had with this game.

Xbox Live play is also a new feature this year, letting you challenge other golfers online and place wagers to raise the stakes. You can participate in tournaments and check out stats like the Money Leaders and the Golfer of the Week. Unfortunately, only two players can play simultaneously, which is a drag and limits the kinds of matches you can play. Like seemingly all the other EA Live titles, connection stability becomes a problem sometimes, and it takes me an average of 15 minutes to get into a playable game. Once you actually start playing, it's pretty fun, but it's disappointing when you realize that the experience would be exponentially better with 4 players.

The art of Tiger 2005 is fantastic, with a vivid palette that make the game look almost like a painting. Sunsets with swirling colors are beautiful and the crystal water and sandy beaches on the tropical courses are gorgeous. You can play with a wide variety of weather effects and time periods that are convincingly rendered, so when you're hitting the course at dusk in pouring rain, you really feel drenched and miserable. The game overall is easy on the eyes, though when the camera zooms in on the course, textures are rather ugly. Trees are pixilated and the grass, well, doesn't look like grass. There are also some rather weird physics in the game, especially on and around the green. The golf ball doesn't always roll into the hole; sometimes I feel like it gets sucked into the hole by a magnetic force. A bit weird, but it's nothing too bad.

Another complaint I have is with the custom soundtracks. EA Trax is in the game, and personally I don't like the music so I always turn them off and play my own songs. However, custom soundtrack integration is horrible. I have no control over what songs I can play, and a new song plays at the start of every hole. This means that I hear about 30 seconds of each song before I finish the hole and move on to the next, triggering a brand new song. Why can't songs carry over?

What I'm very impressed by is the presentation of the game. When you challenge a PGA Tour pro, a quick video biography pops up while the game is loading that tells you about his career. Tips and shot demonstrations by Tiger Woods are also played frequently, and those are always fun to watch.

With no Links 2005 in the works, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 is the best golf game of the year. It would probably dominate anyway, since its combination of features and presentation clobber Links. However, while the 2004 installment was revolutionary with its insane amount of modes, 2005 feels more like an expansion pack to add in some things that perhaps EA ran out of time to put in last year. I would recommend that if you already have Tiger Woods 2004 in your collection, you're better off waiting until 2006 unless you absolutely must have a new golf game each year. The new features in 2005 don't justify spending the extra $50, and online play is merely satisfactory at best. However, for newcomers to the series, this is a fantastic golf game to buy with amazing replay value that will keep you swinging for a very long time.

Our Final ScoreExcellent

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