Total Pro Golf 2 is everything gamers were hoping Total Pro Golf would be! A must buy/must upgrade title for any serious PC sports gamer!

Longtime text-based sports sim developer Gary Gorski, best known for his pro and college basketball games, struck out to form his own studio last year after departing from Grey Dog Software and, to help his new company get off the ground, decided to develop a game that would appeal to a similar core audience of PC gamers that his hoops titles appealed to, yet would be quicker to develop and, therefore, inject some excitement, identity, and yes, cash, into his new operation, Wolverine Studios.

The result was Total Pro Golf, a “text-based sports sim” that Gorski wasn’t sure would find an audience or not, considering no one had ever really attempted anything like it in recent memory. The air was rife with potential objections, like how a golf game could work in a 2D, top-down graphic environment relying mostly on a couple mouse-clicks, all the way to whether the game had enough built-in courses or whether much of his basketball fan base would even be “into” golf.

Gorski needn’t have worried. Not only did the title find a receptive audience, but it exceeded even the best of Wolverine Studios’ modest expectations, garnering not only decent sales, but wide support from the mod community as well, springing up support for mod-community-created courses from two independent Web sites, as well as a Web site/bulletin board community spawned by some of the modders themselves. The modest array of Wolverine Studios-supplied courses grew from the modest four or five that came with the game to well over 40 courses at last casual count on one of the mod-community sites.

While the original Total Pro Golf was a success, it was not without need for improvements. For example, the original TPG was short on tours to conquer, offering the equivalent of a rookie golfer tour, a pro golfer tour and a senior tour. That’s not bad, but this time out there’s a set of world tours to conquer as well as US tours.

The new game, Total Pro Golf 2, is also much deeper in terms of stat-tracking and offering a variety of leader boards and the like. Your golfer’s personal staff also play an expanded role in your career, providing in-game strategy advice such as what kind of practice-and-rest regimen will best suit your career needs, through the addition of a handy “AI Suggest” button.

Also, the game now features a close-up view of greens once your golfer reaches them. Although this is a welcome adjustment, the close-up view of the greens only shows up after you’ve selected and performed your shot, not while setting up and aiming the shot, which is where a close-up of the putting green would be of more use.

More important and game-changing than any other new feature or refinement, however, is the option (but set to default) “three-click” shot interface. In the original Total Pro Golf, taking a shot was basically a rock-paper-scissors affair. After selecting the point at which you were aiming and a club to use, all a gamer could do was select between a normal, over swing and easy swing. Depending on your judgment on shot placement given variables like wind, if you guessed correctly on the type of shot to take, you’d have a better or worse result.

Trouble is, in the original TPG, nearly all of the success of your shot was determined solely by your golfer’s stats, even if you were playing a round instead of simming it, due to the simplified one-click shot system. At times a ball would veer way off course for no reason other than you had a really low ability score in that type of shot.

That all changes with Total Pro Golf 2. Utilizing an updated interface and a new “three-click” system, a gamer can feel he or she has more control over the results of their golf shot. In addition to normal, over swing and easy swing, games can now choose from straight, draw or fade as a shot style before even clicking. Then, once you’ve done that, a “swing bar” appears and you click once to start the shot, once to set the power of the shot, and once to set the accuracy of the shot. Any fan of EA’s Tiger Woods PGA or Sony’s Hot Shots Golf will find themselves in familiar territory with the “three-click” shot system. The closer your clicks are to the “ideal shot marks,” the more you’ll either underhit, overhit or hit the ball just right, as well as determine how accurately your ball lands on the “target mark” you clicked on the course map prior to your shot.

Believe me, it plays a lot simpler than it sounds when you try to explain it. The results the new shot system delivers can be dramatic. Using the new “three-click” system, I went from a golfer with a bad “water hole” habit to a golfer with a “not half-bad” to even “decent” golfer capable of staying in most rounds of golf. The system doesn’t necessarily oversimplify the game or rob it of its pure-sim results, but it does make the game more of a joy to play than to sim through.

In the original TPG, I was given to simming way more rounds than I played, usually playing through the first round of each tournament and then simming the remaining three rounds (assuming I made the cut following day 2, which I often didn’t until my golfer had gone through enough career years to boost his stats. With the new shot system, however, simming holds little appeal, because I feel more involved in the success or failure of each shot my golfer takes.

One of my favorite refinements is a relative simple one: in the first TPG, hovering over the map of the hole would tell you how far away your shot would be if you clicked on the map to set your target for the shot. Trouble was, it only worked sometimes and on certain map hotspots. This time out, the shot-distance hover-over flag works with no dropout or delay, which really lowers the annoyance factor of that feature, though I haven’t had a chance to test the shot-distance flag on mod-created courses; but it does work with the built-in courses, at least, 100 percent of the time. Also, instead of distance only, the target flag now includes slope and lie information.

Featuring well over a dozen brand new features as well as countless refinements and improvements based on customer feedback, Total Pro Golf 2 is the game the original TPG was meant to be. As usual, the mod community is out in full force, delivering extra courses for the game as well as updating the library of TPG courses to work seamlessly with TPG2. And even though the game’s less than a week old, Wolverine has already beta-released two patches to fix problems already encountered by early adopters, well on their way to a first full patch to the game, probably within a week, so you know that Wolverine Studios is once again providing top-notch customer service response to reported bugs.

Total Pro Golf 2 is a must-have for fans of the original, and is the only version those new to the series should even consider buying.

Originally from DigNews