Being a huge RPG fan and a complete golf nut, my excitement for this game was immense. All signs pointed to a hole-in-one but, like my actual golf game - it didn’t take long to realise it's more likely going to be a double bogey.
The early impression is very positive, the visuals are bright and colourful, the art style is charming and reminiscent of early RPG games whilst the story is light-hearted and tongue in cheek. You are tasked with unlocking the golf courses that have been magically sealed off for many years and do this by finding a magic 4 iron named Clubby who is effectively Navi mixed with Deadpool, in that he flies around you constantly, never shutting up and breaking the 4th wall. In all fairness, he can be humorous at times and isn’t anywhere near as irritating as Navi, so that’s something. Armed with Clubby you will fight monsters to unlock golf holes one by one and bring golf back to the masses.
The mechanics for both golf and fighting are both simple yet effective, being a 2D top-down game the mechanics are a standard affair and that’s great. Fighting is a mix of attack, dodge and block and different enemy types have different patterns that you need to learn, some are simple, some difficult, but nothing unmanageable. Later on, there are boss fights and I found them largely enjoyable, not super-easy but also not so hard that I threw my switch out of the window, they were a good challenge.
The golf is a two-button press system - press once on a bar for distance and once on another bar will dictate accuracy, simple effective gameplay, which is why for the first few hours I really enjoyed my time, but then like a sudden tee shot into the trees… things started getting noticeably shaky.
Now, being a huge golf fan, unlocking hole-by-hole, isn’t great. I never felt like I was getting a great golf experience as playing one hole then having to fight loads of monsters felt really disjointed, I would have rather unlocked - say - 3 holes, so it felt like I had substantial playtime before I went back to the grind of monster killing.
That brings the next big problem, the grind of having to kill monsters gets old fast. What I don’t understand is that the only way to unlock holes is through killing monsters and at times only certain monsters or replaying golf holes, this is an RPG, so it obviously has side quests and if they went into easing the grind and actually helped unlock holes, it would have given them a real purpose and a massive incitement for you to complete them, but they just unlock coins and items, and these are so bland that it just made them feel really pointless.
Enemies also have a major problem later on when they begin colour swapping, instead of red… they are now blue, it’s uninspired and when your core gameplay is killing enemies - it’s just a bit weak, I at least want some variety.
The golf courses are disjointed, as the game gets you to seek out holes they don’t flow in a natural manner, and at later stages of the game when they become much larger it becomes a problem, as many times I hit into what I thought was the current hole fairway but instead counted as out of bounds as it was another hole entirely.
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