Swinging is fun..don't tell the wife
The real focus and concentration comes however during approach shots, mainly due to having to judge how much backswing you need to put into each shot. The distance from the green is shown in the bottom corner and you can scroll through the clubs and choose a shot type such as punch, pitch or flop in order to make your shot as successful as possible. But, if for example you’re 120 yards away from the hole and the best club to use is say a 6 iron, which can hit a max distance of 133 yards, then you’ll have to judge how far you backswing; essentially the backswing acts as the power bar, making your fluid movement and judgement of how hard you want to hit a shot an essential part of the gameplay. Swing too far back under the circumstance that I’ve just stated and you’ll land way over the green, backswing too little and you’ll fall short of your intended target. It’s a difficult skill to master and something which we’re all going to have to adapt to if we want to conquer sports titles on Wii; despite judging it correctly numerous times, I could never get it right every single time. Essentially, this means that every shot in PGA Tour 07 needs almost the same focus and concentration that you would apply if you were playing for real.
Putting is also fiendishly difficult and requires the utmost precision and timing if you’ve not been lucky enough to land right next to the hole. Whilst putting, a grid appears which shows the contours of the greens with beads travelling in the same direction as the slope of the green. It’s then a case of judging how fast you swing back the wii-mote and pushing it forward methodically and calmly. EA must have been aware of the difficulty level in putting and thus have added a perfect putt option which is activated by pressing the A button showing you the perfect line for a successful putt. Putting is difficult, it can be frustrating, but it does feel like an accurate representation of the real sport. (I’m useless at putting in real life and also on PGA Tour 07.)
If you do get fed up of standing up playing golf and wish to rest your weary legs or your armpits are aching so much that you can’t even lift your arms up anymore, you can always switch to the tradition Tiger Woods style gameplay by selecting to use the nunchuck as your controller from the character selection screen. It’s then simply a case of using the control stick to move backwards and forwards for your swing, but we’d suggest that if you want a traditional, laid back game of golf buy Tiger Woods for the Xbox 360 instead.
