Removed are the conditional objectives for fast-tracking your progress, such as winning a set number of tournaments in a season. Absent is the option of playing pre-tournament practice rounds to earn additional XP. Gone is the steady rise to the PGA Tour via amateur competitions. What should be the real meat of the single player experience is staggeringly undercooked. Things get even worse when you step into the career mode. Stacked up against the two-year-old Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, the new game has roughly half the number of courses to play on, about a quarter of the licensed players to choose from (with both the Legends and the female LPGA players gone entirely), and a create-a-player tool that ditches the customary eyebrow shaping and body sculpting of the older game in favour of a handful of set templates that are almost guaranteed to look absolutely nothing like you.
From the very first glance at the game’s main menu it’s clear that Rory McIlroy PGA Tour is substantially light on features compared to the last gen Tiger Woods games. However it’s not long after the game’s opening – an exciting race to first place in the dying stages of the US Open interspersed with insightful words from McIlroy himself – that the cracks begin to show. The new open world nature of each course also eliminates the load times between holes, and means poorly placed shots can now be played from out of bounds rather than just incurring an automatic stroke penalty as before, which adds to the realism. The Prologue also introduces you to the new Frostbite 3 engine-powered courses, which look appreciably superior than the links of the last generation – even if some of the textures are a little flat and a lot of the course features tend to pop in around the path of the ball’s flight. This is a golf game that allows the player to effectively determine their own handicap, as opposed to 2014’s The Golf Club which had a more unrelenting focus on serious simulation. You’re given the option of choosing between a classic ‘three-click’ swing timer, and two variants on the more contemporary analogue thumbstick-based setup – one a simplified system augmented with arcade-style power boosting and aftertouch spin controls, the other a more realistic method with all assists turned off and a more sensitive reception to the aim and velocity of your swing.I especially like how you can heavily customise each of the three mechanics to suit your own skills I ended up settling on the latter more realistic setting only with the putting path aid toggled on (because my short game is terrible). The Prologue that opens the game does an excellent job of introducing the three new control systems.
It’s a shame too because Rory McIlroy PGA Tour gets off to a great start.