Review: Golf With Your Friends
Nintendo Switch: Golf With Your Friends
I used to love playing mini-golf as kid, then in later life as I had children of my own, I used to love taking them to play it too. Navigating the twists and turns of every hole, trying to putt just hard enough to get it through the tiny tunnel carved into the concrete, yet not too hard that it would go flying through and bounce off into the nearby flowerbeds.
Not once though did I ever navigate my jet propelled ball through the air while it was wearing a dinosaur head and a rubber ring…that is until I played Golf With Your Friends.
Featuring 13 crazy courses and a wealth of options to play both offline and online, Golf With Your Friends gives you enough gameplay options to play the game exactly how you want to play it.
The courses are:
- Forest
- Haunted
- Oasis
- Space Station
- Museum
- Pirate Cove
- Volcano
- Ancient
- Twilight
- Candyland
- Worms
- The Escapists
- The Deep
Each of the 13 courses have their own particular theme and obstacles to overcome, with the initial few holes gently easing you in before the challenge begins to ramp up as you play the 18 holes.
None of them will blow you away with their graphics (with ‘Worms’ seemingly having the most love paid to it), but they are colourful and atmospheric, while giving a good sense of scale as the holes you are faced with get bigger and more challenging.
You can play any of the courses in a variety of modes:
- Classic
- Dunk
- Hockey
- Explore
- Party
With ‘Hockey’ being a particular favourite, using a hockey puck instead of a ball and finishing by trying to get past the goalie in a net.
Just playing classic mode gives you such a huge array of options that you can never get bored with it. Changing things such as:
- Shots per round
- Time allowed
- Powerups on or off
- Gravity settings
- Bouncy ground
- Ball shape
and much more.
The customisation continues through to how you want your ball to look, being able to pick its colour, a ‘hat’ it can wear along with a ‘floatie’, while also being able to choose what kind of a trail it leaves behind when you putt.
The gameplay is a classic example of “easy to learn, hard to master“, with you simply aiming the direction of the ball where you want it to (hopefully) go and then setting the power. This very often though is a matter of trial and error, as it is all too easy to have either too much or too little power and completely mess the shot up.
Helping you to navigate the course is the ability to go into free-camera mode where you can fly around and try to work out how to get past the obstacles, though this is timed by default and you have to be quick (this is yet another option that can be changed should you so wish).
The free-camera is a huge help when trying to get Par or below on some of the more trickier holes, especially the ones where your ball becomes rocket powered and you have to fly from one segment of the hole to another. These sections are definitely the most frustrating and will invariably see you reaching your shot limit per hole well before you are in sight of the flag.
As with mini-golf in real life though, the more you practise, the better you get, and if you can persevere through the frustrating segments that could induce a rage quit, then it all begins to click into place and you find yourself getting a satisfying birdie at a hole that you previously couldn’t even finish within the regulation amount of shots.
Golf With Your Friends could also have the tagline of “Also good without friends”, as I played it solo and had a great time with it. The times I tried online multiplayer it couldn’t find any servers, though this will surely improve as more people get the game, and I can also see it being a blast in 12 player co-op mode passing the controllers around at home.
A fun and challenging game that has enough gameplay options to keep you satisfied no matter how you want to play it, Golf With Your Friends is a fantastic way to play outrageous holes of mini-golf in the comfort of your own home or on the move.
Golf With Your Friends is available on PC, PS4, Xbox One & Nintendo Switch.
Review by Dave.
