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R/rorymcilroypgatour: All new golf video game for next gen consoles! Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. Log in sign up. User account menu. Rory Mcilroy PGA Tour r/rorymcilroypgatour. Hot new top rising. Break free from what you think a golf game can be. Frostbite creates a new world, where you experience every detail – breathing life into the courses, players.
Game Info |
Box ArtN/A |
PlatformPS4, Xbox One |
PublisherEA Sports |
DeveloperEA Tiburon |
Release DateJul 14, 2015 |
The list of can'ts in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour is as long as the par-5 14th hole at Pebble Beach, which, to get things started, you can't play — and Pebble had been on the disc of every game in this series going back to 1997.
If possible, the absence of famed Augusta National, which grabbed a lot of attention when EA Sports admitted that licensing agreement was over, is the least disappointing thing about this series' debut on the current console generation. But we can start with the pitifully small list of real-life courses that are available — eight, compared to 20 in its predecessor, and even more as downloadable content. (There are four fantasy courses ranging from realistic to bizarre.)
the list of real-life courses that are available is pitifully small
You can't select individual holes, all par-3s or all-par 5s on these courses to work on a specific section giving you trouble. It's either front nine, back nine or the whole round. You can't play in any weather other than clear skies. You can't play popular variants like skins, Stableford scoring or best ball. It's just stroke or match play.
You can't play the LPGA Tour and you can't even play as any real-life LPGA pro. Five were in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14. You can create a golfer of either gender, but you can't give him or her anything other than one of 11 pre-set heads or three body types. Of all the sports video games, golf is the one where everyone creates and plays as themselves, and this is an embarrassingly decade-old toolkit serving such a baseline expectation.
![Tour Tour](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125790079/110074060.jpg)
You can't play any amateur career (three were in Tiger Woods 14). You get one event on the minor-league Web.com Tour in which it is nearly impossible not to earn your PGA Tour card. You can't even — and for me, this was the most cynical omission — see the schedule in your player's career, probably because it would be an admission of how few events are on it. There are two major tournaments, the U.S. Open and the British Open, but you only get that presentation in your career. Can't select it in a round with friends.
In a career event, you can't simulate rounds to play only the final round, as many did in the past. You are given something called quick rounds, which offer five or six key holes and simulate the rest, but you must play some holes in all four rounds. If a course doesn't appeal to you, the only option is to withdraw.
You can't even see the schedule in your player's career
Rory McIlroy PGA Tour seems to want to justify the absence of so many things longtime players have come to expect by virtue of its presentation and an evolution in its basic mechanics. The career mode does have a new progression system that deepens your player's package of abilities instead of forcing him or her to be pure power, pure accuracy or down the middle.
Analog swing controls are improved by a shot-strength indicator that lets you watch your golfer in action, instead of a meter, and introduces some needed variability and difficulty in placing a shot. The game is still very forgiving, even for advanced users who turn off most of the package of swing assists and targeting help.
The gameplay's real strength is in putting, which now presents a reasonable and understandable challenge without babying the player with artificial preview paths, or abandoning him or her to long stretches of trial and error. A dashed line now represents the ideal putt path, which you then try to match using your aim and your own feeling of how fast and steep the green and its break are. There is a very nice feeling of accomplishment on 12-foot putts, and longer distances make it more sensible to just lag it close and two-putt, which in turn makes an accurate approach shot even more important.
Rory McIlroy PGA Tour also uses the new hardware to render the entire course instead of individual holes, which eliminates both the between-hole loads and the awkward broadcast graphics you saw while waiting. Shots that clip trees can now plow through the branches if they're going hard enough, where in the past they would fall straight down. The more powerful rendering does offer courses that play truer by keeping bad but not out-of-bounds shots still in play, and playing your ball where it lies, even if it's a real humdinger, rather than repositioning it automatically.
The crowds and their chatter are a lot more lifelike and the broadcast commentary of Rich Lerner and Frank Nobilo, of the Golf Channel, is much more conversational than the wooden and overacted delivery of Jim Nantz. However, it is given to repetition, even as the two helpfully chime in with anecdotes while you're taking time to line up your shot. The golfers have more detailed reactions and facial expressions, but they veer to the extreme. Why is my golfer doing the running-man dance after hitting his tee shot 276 yards on the first hole of the second round?
Online play is well-supported, with daily and weekly tournaments always available in addition to head-to-head matches against live opponents. There's an arcade suite called the Night Club Challenge in which players test their accuracy or driving distance on one of three neon-trimmed courses, equipping boosts to pull off stunt shots. It isn't as intriguing or deep as the historical or biographical modes its two predecessors offered, but it does offer more than 100 tricks to pull off, many tickling the common obsession with hitting a perfect shot.
Wrap Up:
Rory McIlroy PGA Tour falls far short of its predecessors
This is Rory McIlroy PGA Tour's overarching problem. It is a smooth-playing game of golf, which makes the inability to use its new gameplay on the old features fans loved even more regrettable.
Rory McIlroy PGA Tour is the last sports video game to make the console generation transition. It's painful to see another game — particularly this series — so gutted of features. After hitting its drive very thin, Rory McIlroy PGA Tour is facing a long second, even third shot before it gets back to the kind of variety and value its three predecessors offered.
Rory McIlroy PGA Tour was reviewed using a final Xbox One retail copy provided by Electronic Arts. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here.
About Polygon's Reviews6.0 Xbox One
The franchise sustained a major blow when its poster boy, the seemingly squeaky clean Tiger Woods, made a series of questionable decisions regarding evening entertainment. After EA cut ties with Woods, the development of a 2014 PGA Tour game never got sorted out. The team at HB Studios, which EA contracted to work on its annual golf franchise, went on to release its own independent golf game, The Golf Club, that year.EA Tiburon took its time with the development of Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, but I honestly have no idea what it spent all of that time doing.This game is a mess. It is extremely difficult. It lacks the customization options and expansive roster of playable characters we expect from a triple-A sports franchise — especially a battle-tested EA one. Even its highly touted real-life golf course selection is missing the Augusta National Golf Club — site of The Masters Golf Tournament and one of the most famous courses on Earth.If you are a hardcore golf fan, this has a few things for you.
If you don’t know the difference between a punch and a flop shot, then run — run far away. What you’ll likeTons of ways to get your ball on the green. Image Credit: EA SportsOne of Rory McIlroy PGA Tour’s few bright spots is its dizzying array of shot types, clubs, and spins.You’ve got punch shots to get you under the trees and flop shots to stop your ball from rolling.
You can bend shots with the wind to wrap balls around major obstacles, or you can ease up on the shot stick to hit the ball shorter than your club’s maximum distance.Players also have a ton of decisions to make about which clubs actually go into their bags. Choose from various wedges, irons, woods, putters, and drivers. If you are feeling especially adventurous, you can even try hybrid clubs.
I think they are some sort of wood/iron mix, and frankly, it’s just not natural.I didn’t grasp most of this customization. I am pretty sure subtracting loft from my driver made the ball go faster, but I can’t be certain. However, some of you may know enough about golf swings and clubs to make excellent use of these options.For me, every shot that doesn’t hit the audience or land in the water is a perfect shot.A good variety of courses with minimal loading timesIt’s clear that EA Tiburon put its focus on course development, and that shines through in the final product. A dozen actual courses and five fictitious ones offer a great variety of settings.Three of pro golf’s four most recent major tournament locations are represented. EA’s licensing deal with Augusta and The Masters tournament expired, so it didn’t make the cut.The made-up courses are pretty fun, too.
The title even features one course based on Parcel Storm, a Battlefield 4 map. You can also choose to play a strange practice course in the Night Club Challenge, PGA’s after-dark take on a typical skills challenge mode.These various courses also don’t require loading between holes. The switch to Battlefield’s Frostbite 3 game engine allows for slashed loading times across the board. Couple this with the Quick Rounds feature, which mercifully enables you to play four of 18 holes and then simulate the rest, and you can zip through tournaments in an hour.I enjoyed the scenery in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour.
It’s a shame that we’re forced to play such impossibly hard and boring golf on these beautiful courses. Image Credit: EA Sports What you won’t likeHitting the ballYou may have a million ways to customize your shot before you take it, but you are totally screwed once you swing that club.I spent most of my time playing arcade-style, which is supposed to be “for everyone.” I thought this would be an easy, fun playstyle to smash some balls and sink some putts.I was wrong.It was a nightmare. And the Tour mode, the actual hard mode, is an unspeakable horror.
It is the Dark Souls of sports-gaming modes.In Arcade mode, the cursor for guessing where your shot will land is flat-out broken. It doesn’t seem to take your player’s attributes and clubs or the environmental conditions into effect whatsoever. Previous PGA Tour games would also aim your golfer in the right direction on each shot, enabling you to make minor adjustments or just pull back and let fly.I can’t stress this enough: Never do this in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour. You will hit it straight into sandy or wet places, and those are enemies of the digital golfer.Oh, and god help you if you shank one into the audience (and you will).
The game has this crazy glitch where spectators don’t move from in front of your golfer while the golfer is shooting. So you just keep cranking it off these horribly animated onlookers, causing your ball to completely stop about 20 yards from where you hit it. It takes about four strokes to get out of this mess, which will almost certainly ruin your round. Image Credit: EA SportsA lack of golfers and created golfer customizationMaybe I’m a sports-gaming snob, but it is absolutely unacceptable to have to choose from preset faces when creating a digital athlete. Electronic Arts has the Game Face feature, which enables you to upload a picture and create your digital self for Madden, FIFA, and UFC games. Somehow, this feature got lost on the way to the links?Not only is Game Face missing, but you have to choose between a dozen or so preset appearances for your created player. I honestly can’t remember the last time I had to do this in a major sports title.If you don’t want to carve your own path through the green, you can choose from all of 12 actual golfers and five ridiculous made-up ones.
I am not a huge golf fan, but I am pretty sure that a dozen playable characters doesn’t even account for 1 percent of the professional ranks.The roster doesn’t include Tiger Woods. I understand this was probably set in stone when EA yanked him off the cover, but it still feels weird to play a golf game without him.Instead of legends or more pros, we get weird soldiers and a metal dude as unlockable characters. The developers also put somebody’s grandparents in the game in the form of a playable elderly couple with low stats.Why take a fun, silly approach in this aspect of the game but not allow players to casually rack up low scores? I want an easy and casual game mode; I don’t want to play impossibly challenging golf dressed as a soldier. ConclusionRory McIlroy PGA Tour did not reward the patience of the franchise’s fans. Waiting more than two years for a game with shoddy shot mechanics and less than 20 playable golfers is a direct slap in the face.Players will get to see some great representations of famous golf courses, and the diehard golf fans among them may unlock the secrets of the elusive under-par round.
But most of us will share the experiences of the average recreational golfer: We will hit two good shots in a row, think we finally have the hang of it, then spend four hours cursing and breaking things.The title may feature a popular sport and a kid-friendly rating, but this is a game for a very select few. Tee up at your own risk.Score: 50/100Rory McIlroy PGA Tour comes out on July 14 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. EA Sports provided GamesBeat with a retail PS4 copy for the purposes of this review.
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