Real Time Swing Feedback is a new gauge implemented to show where your hook and slice tendencies are messing up a good shot by highlighting the swing arc across the ball. This innovative new feature draws a line across a representation of the ball to help underline exactly where your personal tendencies lie in terms of the control system – a good shot will draw a line directly down the middle of the ball, while a clumsy shot veers off to the sides. Seeing a graphical interpretation of your controller inaccuracies is a huge help in refining your virtual swing that’s as simple to use and understand as it is to improve upon.

The most noticeable adjustment comes from the EA GamerNet integration. In previous iterations of the PGA Tour franchise, this online aspect was set to the side of ordinary games; requiring players to make specific use of the feature whenever they wanted to challenge an online player or add their specifics to the leader boards. In Tiger ’09, we see the GamerNet data being put to use throughout the game, in a slick and unobtrusive manner that makes online statistics incredibly easy to make sense of right there on the fairway.

When approaching the tee, or the green, or any other area of particular significance on a course, a subtle marker shows virtual golfers what other players around the world have achieved, such as long drives or accurate shots, by way of faint highlighting. These can also be small challenges set up by other players, perhaps encouraging you to get closer to the hole from a certain distance than they managed, or making a particularly long drive from the off. Of course, this function can be turned off entirely for those who find a littered screen annoying, but it does strike this reviewer that seeing such well represented graphical data during play isn’t entirely dissimilar to the kind of sporting knowledge that would be going through the mind of professional golfer, and adds depth to the gameplay where we previously weren’t aware that it was a bit shallow.