From my position in the left hand bunker on the 17th, I could pretty much see any hopes I had of winning my first ever career tournament skittling off the side of the nearby cliff face and tumbling into the sea. For the majority of the four rounds over which the tournament was being held I’d somehow managed to keep my rookie nose in front, but a strong prevailing wind, the presence of copious amounts of sand and a one-shot lead proved too much pressure to bear. A few haphazard shots later my round was finished, as was any hope of winning top prize.

It’s for reasons like this that I enjoy somewhat of a love/hate relationship with golf games. See, when things are going well you find yourself naturally building momentum; your swing becomes second nature, your judgement exact at every turn, every putt you attempt rolls right into the middle of the cup. When things are going badly your shots skew off in seemingly random directions, you spend a lot of your time building sandcastles in the nearest bunker and unless your ball is teetering over the edge of being in the hole there’s a chance your putt will slide wide and roll a million miles down a hill and off a green. Even typing these words raises my ire slightly.

Tiger Woods 10 is the first time I’ve played a Tiger game for a couple of years, and whilst on first appearances little appears to have changed sustained play reveals a wealth of moderate and minor new features that nudge the series along nicely enough. The main meat of the game is, as ever, to be found in the career mode, in which you create your own golfer in a commendably detailed create suite (you can even paste your face in if you have a PlayStation Eye, although results are rather varied) and take them through a calendar of events in which you can upgrade your attributes and equipment.

With 16 courses to work through across a number of events, this is obviously going to take you plenty of time as you go year-to-year. A pleasing addition to the package is this year’s U.S. Open at Bethpage (a pretty tricky course as it turns out), and overall the entire thing is improved yet again by the sheer atmosphere that EA have crammed in as you take your round. As you are on your walkies the crowd in the distance will occasionally cheer and gasp to represent an opponent climbing up or slipping down the leaderboard, whilst if you find yourself topping the tables you’ll notice that every good shot you produce is welcomed with a cacophonous roar. Can be spine tingling stuff, especially if you produce something brilliant against all odds.

Tweaks have also been made to the way your character levels his attributes up from the last time I played, with power, accuracy, short game and putting being available and relatively quickly improvable compared to past events. The trade-off for the rapid stats increase is that, unlike before, your stats can go down if you perform badly. Each bit of equipment you unlock can give these attributes a boost, but they come at a risk as they make things more difficult and rely more on your own accuracy to do so. It’s a nice risk/reward mechanic and manages to keep even the most experienced of Tiger players on their toes.

Down on ground level a few little tweaks have been made to the golfing itself, with the most prominent being the new putting system. Rather than having a selection of putters that you can use for different occasions, the game now presents you with one that will inform you how much power on the bar you need to hit to reach the hole. If this sounds a little easy then you’ll also have to factor in that this marker does not take into account slope or condition of the green at all, and even though the game still offers you a single putt preview which shows you the line (unless you are on the hardest difficulty, naturally), you still have to use a fair bit of judgement when it comes to knocking them in from the green. It certainly takes the frustration out of the bit of the game where previous Tigers used to often select completely the wrong club for the situation.

Another thing to take into account is weather, with rain and wind swirling around to completely todge up the greens and make you think twice about the kind of shot you’re playing. Interestingly, the game also takes weather readings from the courses’ real life locations and give you the conditions that are prevalent at the time you wish to start your round, which works particularly nicely in the online live tournaments as you can hold off for the real life weather should you not fancy a bit of the damp stuff. Not a hugely groundbreaking idea, but a nice touch nonetheless.

Other little features are packed in to extend longevity even further, with a range of challenges that recreate classic golfing moments, mini games and online tournament and solo rounds on offer across a selection of different golf scoring rules. There’s more than enough in the career mode alone to keep you going for months, but taking things online and playing against other people and other peoples’ custom challenges will keep the disc spinning around in your PS3 for even longer still. If there is one thing you can’t complain about when it comes to Tiger 10, it’s the sheer amount of golfing options loaded in for your enjoyment.

There are quibbles of course when it comes to how different the game is to its predecessors, but to be honest other than packing in a few new features and polishing the thing graphically there was not much that EA could really have done with the thing. As you’d expect the presentation is as slick as a fat guy rolling in grease, whilst the online integration is practically seamless. It’s the kind of sports game that you don’t mind picking up again year-on-year to take advantage of the odd new course and feature, because EA have been doing Tiger right for a number of years now and it’s a pleasure to play… unless you end up in a bunker, of course. Then things get a little fraught.