Developer: HYDE Inc.
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Platform: Switch, PC, PS5
Tested on: PC
Everybody’s Golf: Hot Shots – Review
Although Everybody’s Golf has been around in some way or another since 1997, this humble reviewer had never crossed paths with it. Part of this is because the penultimate game in the series was back in 1997, but we’re also not the biggest fans of straight-up golf sims in the first place. Mind you, we do enjoy off-beat takes on the genre like What the Golf? or Golf Club Wasteland, but you won’t find us playing the latest Tiger Woods game any time soon. The Everybody’s Golf series seemingly aims to bridge the gap between serious golf sims and quirky ones, so perhaps its latest entry, Everybody’s Golf: Hot Shots, is our gateway ticket to the green. Is Hot Shots up to par, or is it a whiff?
Story
Given that Hot Shots is a golf sim, it’s not entirely unexpected that the game doesn’t put a whole lot of emphasis on its story. This is a genre that isn’t known for having gripping narratives after all. The handful of narrative components that are in Hot Shots are sprinkled over the game’s World Tour mode, which is the game’s closest thing to a story mode. In World Tour, you select one of the game’s golfers and play through a series of matches, with short visual novel-style cutscenes before and after games. These scenes are character-specific and mostly consist of inconsequential dialogue that ties into the cast’s larger-than-life personalities. Take Mizuki, for example, whose story scenes are overly dramatic and feel like they were lifted straight out of a sports anime. There are over 25 characters to unlock in Hot Shots, and each of them has its own mini storyline, but none of them provide deep storytelling. Instead, they just reinforce Hot Shots’ goofy tone.
Graphics
Nowhere does that same tone shine through harder than in Hot Shots’ over-the-top character designs and humorous animations. Character reactions are emphasized by exaggerated expressions, and even something as relatively mundane as a nice shot is accompanied by plenty of over-the-top fanfare. The individual characters are the highlight here, with their personalities shining through in their designs. The game’s different environments are almost as varied as the cast, with settings like beaches, volcanic mountains, and even space-themed areas. That said, while the character models benefit from the simplifications that are inherent to cartoon designs, the environments end up looking flat and dated due to a lack of details. Visual performance is inconsistent and uneven as well, with occasional stuttering and frame drops.
Sound
We’re typically proponents of voice acting in games, as this usually elevates the feeling of immersion. There are always exceptions to this, however, and Hot Shots is one of those. The issue here is that characters repeat their one-liners ad nauseam, to the point that it becomes annoying and exhausting. Hearing “You got this!” every time you take a shot gets old very quickly. Likewise, the game’s soundtrack is missing variation, and you’ll often hear the same track looping for 30 minutes, which becomes tiresome. Conversely, the game’s ambience is very sparse. Sound effects are serviceable but nothing special.
Gameplay
The core gameplay of Hot Shots is built around an easy-to-learn but hard-to-master three-click swing system. On the first click, a power bar starts filling up, with the second one setting the desired power and the third one setting accuracy. Clicking is easy enough, with the tricky part being that you need to get the timing absolutely correct. It’s a very sensitive system, and small mistakes lead to big consequences when it comes to landing those perfect shots. Weather, wind, and terrain, like slopes on the green, are factors that require attention to detail, and you’ll need to think about the type of spin that you apply to your shot. Backspins will have more airtime and less roll, for example, but are more susceptible to wind effects, whereas sidespins will counter wind effects. If that sounds complicated, don’t fret, as Hot Shots has been designed to accommodate not just golf veterans but newcomers as well. The game’s extensive tutorials teach advanced techniques, making even the more complicated aspects of Hot Shots easy to pick up.
Most of Hot Shots is built around these core mechanics, with the game’s feeling of progress being tied to unlocking new characters and gear across the World Tour, Classic, and Challenge modes. You start out with just two playable characters, and unlocking everything requires a lot of grinding and replaying the same ten courses over and over again. It doesn’t help that course difficulty is often tied to RNG, making it so that even nearly perfectly timed shots can still lead to bad results due to, for example, inconsistent weather influence. This brings us to the game’s Wacky Golf mode, which veers much closer to the light-hearted absurdity of those aforementioned quirky golf games. Wacky Golf introduces minigame variants like Boom Golf, which is golf with explosions, and Scramble, which is a team play mode. Unfortunately, the AI in Scramble usually isn’t up to snuff, overall handicapping your team instead of helping you. This undermines what could essentially be a fun, Mario Party-esque take on golf, although much of the AI-related frustration is likely alleviated in multiplayer.
As a whole, Hot Shots does get its core gameplay experience right, but much of what made the game frustrating is a direct result of a lack of polish. We do appreciate the back-to-basics approach when it comes to the mechanics, but the influence of RNG adds a frustrating layer of unintentional randomness that makes the game feel more luck-based than skill-based. For as grindy of a game as Hot Shots is, course variety is also something we could have wished for, although the upside here is that you’ll become intimately familiar with every single course simply because of how many times you’ll revisit them. With each character unlock eating up roughly half an hour of playtime, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth out of Hot Shots’ runtime.
Conclusion
We tried to keep our mind as open as possible when reviewing Hot Shots, but the game wasn’t entirely able to convince us of the appeal of golf sims. While we can only laud the game’s accessibility for newcomers and appreciate the three-click swing system, we can’t ignore the rough edges here either. Hot Shots’ innate grindiness, lack of course variety, and annoyingly repetitive soundscape make for a game that, while good at its core, overstays its welcome.
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