Golf With Your Friends – Review

Golfing games have always made for an interesting premise, be it the realistic ones for those properly enthused about the sport in general, or wacky mini-golf games to play with your friends. The latter has been an entertaining treat for local hangouts, but even so, not everyone shares the same interest of cupping a ball after hitting it several times. Team17 must have imagined that it would be an interesting concept to bring people together that love unrealistic miniature golf courses. Golf With Your Friends might sound like a great idea to play with your friends, but it probably ends up with you playing with a lot of strangers online.

Story

As this is a party golfing game, there is no story to be found. A game such as this requires no overarching plot to make things interesting. You pick yourself a shiny colored ball, you put a silly hat on it, add an interesting trail to blind your opponents and you whack your ball to the end-zone. There’s nothing more to it and that’s perfectly fine.

Graphics

Graphically Golf With Your Friends isn’t that impressive looking. The game looks as if it would still run on a previous generation of consoles, which isn’t that bad per se. You’ll have fairly distinct tracks, all adhering to the theme you select before you start playing. All of these courses have certain obstacles and decorations, and they never get over the top, meaning things will remain rather clear. As you’ll also be playing with other players in a simultaneous fashion, we reckon the graphical quality has been kept rather low to prevent frame drops. We have to say that the camera angles are sometimes really awkward, and more than often you can’t properly angle them to make things better.

Sound

The sound design is simple, but certainly suffices for a game such as this. The music for each region is quite upbeat, but nothing memorable, and some tracks may get on your nerves after a while. The sound effects are equally as simplistically handled, but once again, they do the trick.

Gameplay

Golf With Your Friends is the ultimate multiplayer mini-golf game, albeit for those wanting to play online. The game has different themes to choose from, each with 18 holes to clear. Clearing them will unlock customization options for your golf ball, and of course, it’s great to challenge other players and show them your (digital) skills. This is also a game that is played simultaneously with other players, which means that you’ll all be messing around at the same time. Sadly, we didn’t encounter any full games on our Switch version, as the servers are somewhat underpopulated, often only presenting us with a handful of lobbies to pick from, each only having one or two players in them.

The mechanics of the game are simple; you position yourself, you choose how hard you want to hit the ball, and then you hope for the best. The oversight of the tracks is extremely poorly handled, but you have a free camera option that you can use for a limited time in the Classic mode. Settings can allow for longer usage of the free camera, as well as the putting time available. When opting to play everything according to the Classic rules, you’ll have a very limited time to clear the track you’re on. While we found mostly lobbies that stuck to the Classic rules, or close variations of said ruleset, you can opt to change a lot of options, as you can even change the way you clear a hole, or play with a hockey puck instead of a golf ball, add items and traps to the mix, etc. The game is neatly created, but the low population on the servers makes it somewhat bland to play.

Of course, you can opt to really play with your friends locally, but this mode is absolutely no fun to play. You’ll only be able to play in a ‘Hotseat’ formula, in which each player takes turns. This in itself is fairly okay-ish, it’s very annoying that you can only do so with one controller, thus making it tedious to pass it around after each stroke. Not only is this formula annoying, but it’s also quite ridiculous to have the same player start on each of the different holes, as the following players can just copy his move(s) in case of good approaches to the course’s green.

Conclusion

A game such as Golf With Your Friends is made or broken by its active community. As it currently stands, the severs are severely underpopulated, making it hard to properly enjoy this gaming experience. Nonetheless, the content that’s present lends itself to be a fun experience with friends and strangers online. Sadly, the offline multiplayer mode doesn’t feel fleshed out to compensate the empty servers. Still worth looking into, but it’s unsure if this game will have a long lifespan if it doesn’t get more attention soon.

Ibuki

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Aspiring ninja.

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