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Review: Rory McIlroy PGA Tour

Rory McIlroy PGA Tour wears its compromise on its sleeve. Building a new engine or rather, a golf game within the ubiquitous EA Frostbite engine is a challenging prospect; as we approach the second birthday of the Xbox One and PS4, EA Sports has felt the need to rush their next generation golf game to market, and it shows. Technical issues abound and compared to last generation’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour games it is bare bones in every way.

While content and polish is severely lacking in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, mercifully it plays a decent (but hardly outstanding) round of golf. The default arcade swing mechanics and aids make golf laughably easy (the trajectory marker that accounts for wind and elevation removes just about every skill requirement from the game) but you have myriad customisation options to make the game as hard as you like.

Both the traditional three click swing and the modern analogue stroke are included and every feature can be toggled from the ability to charge a drive or add spin to a ball in the air to (for the sadistic) removing the ability to zoom to where your shot will land or the ever useful green grid. While I prefer the swing mechanics of McIlroy’s most recent competitor, HB Studios’ The Golf Club, in just about every way, playing a round in McIlroy is fun and for those looking for a relaxing, arcade golfing experience you will not be disappointed here.

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Digging beneath the surface exposes a lot of flaws in both execution and approach to the swing mechanics that hinder the game over long term play. The core of the issue is shot distance being mostly controlled by an aim marker rather than the swing itself, meaning you go through the same motion for any swing whether it be drive, chip, sand escape or putt. It removes the skill of club selection and controlled swings, hitting a ball at 80 percent is no longer a matter of deft touch but just measuring out and doing the same motion you always do. Some of the harder difficulty options allow the tempo and timing of your swing to have an effect on the distance but once you master the swing motion the game becomes purely about where you want to put the ball, not about getting it there.

It is especially notable on the green, where putting loses all sense of feel. With no sense of touch or variation in power putting becomes a matter of reading the green and adjusting your aim, something the game seems to want to do for you with a “Read Green” feature that shows the aim and line needed to sink a putt and should be turned off immediately for anybody who doesn’t want to trivialise this crucial aspect of golf. The putting action is the same for a tap in as it is a forty foot monster, you just pick a spot and go, and is immensely unsatisfying.

On the technical side Rory McIlroy PGA Tour has a lot of problems. Graphically the courses look good, the water effects are beautiful and the grass looks great, but touches like the crowd, who refuse to move out of the path of wayward shots and as a result the ball bounces off them like they are made of stone, are poor. The real world courses are recreated accurately down to the finest details and both the realistic and ridiculous fantasy courses look the part too (golfing in the Grand Canyon is a sight to behold). Unfortunately this comes at a cost of texture and object pop-in, right from the title screen where a panning course shot is ruined by a variety of wildlife suddenly blinking in and continuing through the entire game, particularly in transitions between holes. The sound of club on ball is strangely muted; one of the great sounds in sport is a driver making perfect contact on a tee shot and PGA Tour misses the mark on it.

The much ballyhooed lack of load times between holes courtesy of the frostbite engine is overstated hype, not only does The Golf Club also manage this but it can do so without needing the unskippable transitions to a scoreboard or panning vanity shot of the next hole that Rory leans on. The fantasy courses had some camera issues thanks to the unusual scenery, several times on the Grand Canyon I was aiming blind due to the camera looking straight up or down, wedged into the mountainous terrain.

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While the TV style overlays are of broadcast quality they are not backed up by the commentary team of Rich Lerner and Frank Nobilo who are often inaccurate and repetitive. Some of it is technical, Lerner regularly got my tee shot confused for my second shot or called my round disappointing because I punctuated a run of several birdies with a par. Nobilo’s colour work can be good and often times helpful, explaining the various dangers of the coming hole or sharing anecdotes about Tiger Woods was a highlight. Well, it was the first time I heard it, by the end of four tournament rounds on the same course he sounded like a drunk friend telling you that one story over and over. Lerner can get bent for how many times he told me I ‘have the touch of a plumber’ when I missed a thirty foot putt by two inches.

A far more egregious technical hitch is the input lag in just about every aspect of the game outside of the swing itself which is thankfully unaffected. Every menu takes a second or two to appear and moving between options is sluggish making navigating a chore. Zooming to where you ball will land is not a smooth pan but a fade out, fade in and even skipping the various interstitial scenes takes a beat longer than it should. The overall effect is to make the game feel choppy, janky and rushed to market.

That rushed feeling doesn’t go away when you look at the content offering for the game. Personally I don’t feel 12 courses is a small number but those coming from last generations Tiger Woods series will be used to double that and two of the courses offered are novelties, the Battlefield inspired par 3 romp through tropical islands and wrecked battleships and the aforementioned Grand Canyon tour. There is a minimal number of real professional golfers to play as, no female golfers and a bunch of uninspired novelty characters. Even game modes are compromised, only bare bones stroke and match play is included, no best ball, no skins.

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Most concerning are the pathetic golfer creation tools, where you can choose from a laughably small selection of faces without even basic customisation options and no support for importing your own likeness through EA Game Face, a curious omission. I found all of the 11 facial options for male golfers hideously ugly and little can be done to improve them. Watching these monstrosities overenthusiastically celebrate a birdie by doing the robot or posing like Hulk Hogan is a sight to behold.

In PGA Tour mode you don’t get to assign your own skill points anymore, merely “influence” them with unlockable styles, while selecting clothes and clubs using the horrible menu systems is painful. In a solitary sport like golf creating a player, tailoring them to your own skill set and decking them out in new gear is a huge part of the game, it is very sad to see such little effort being exerted in such a critical part of a golf game.

Where a lot of effort has gone is into the Night Club Challenges mode, where you take on a variety of skill tests that start as simple nearest pin or putting challenges but quickly ramp up to golfing obstacle courses with moving targets and barriers that can only be navigated with the help of limited use special abilities. In these quick fire challenges the sluggish interface is at its worst and the framerate dipped at times. The tasks themselves were a bit of fun and while I can’t see myself ever getting through all 180 challenges it is a nice diversion from the base game.

Rory McIlroy PGA Tour simply feels unfinished, rushed. Where the spit and polish has been applied the game is good, but design decisions with the swing mechanics betray a lack of understanding about what makes golf such a challenging, rewarding and infuriating sport to play. The technical flaws and lack of content would have been unacceptable for a launch title, let alone one that arrives nearly two years into the current generation. Those looking for a casual experience will find something to like but if you want a game that gets the feel of golf right and provides a stiff challenge, The Golf Club leaves Rory McIlroy PGA Tour at the clubhouse bar, drowning its sorrows.

Rory McIlroy PGA Tour was reviewed using a retail disc on Xbox One, provided by the publisher.

 

Review: Rory McIlroy PGA Tour
5 out of 10

The good

  • Swing mechanics and aids can be customised extensively.
  • Before it starts repeating itself commentary can be entertaining.

The bad

  • Player creation tools are a bad joke.
  • Technical issues make the game feel sluggish.
  • Big reduction in content from last generation’s Tiger Woods games.

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About the author

Stuart Gollan

From Amiga to Xbox One, Doom to Destiny, Megazone to Stevivor, I've been gaming through it all and have the (mental) scars to prove it. I love local multiplayer, collecting ridiculous Dreamcast peripherals, and Rocket League.