Golf With Your Friends review

Reviewed on: PC

The ideal multiplayer game is one that is already good even when played alone, but gets even better with your friends. Games with refined gameplay, well balanced, beautiful, made with care, and that, on top of all that, also let you share the experience with other people. Golf With Your Friends is not one of those cases.

Golf With Your Friends is a mini-golf game, that is, you play golf across various areas, from simple forests to haunted mansions, by way of outer space and other oddities. In case you don’t know, the goal of a golf game is to get your ball into the hole in the fewest strokes possible. An area has a total of 18 holes, and at the end of all of them the player with the fewest strokes wins. Simple rules for a game that, in real life and in other video games of the sport, lead to extremely technical and competitive matches. Mini-golf sets technique and seriousness aside and puts fun at the center of the experience, adding obstacles of the most varied kinds between the ball and your goal. That is what Golf With Your Friends tries to do, but fails.
Let’s start with the positive part. The different (and very varied) courses available are pretty cool. My favorite is a haunted mansion, and its 18 holes feature obstacles such as secret passages, ghosts and other things that get in your way, which you must avoid in order to reach the hole. Each area has a theme, and these themes are applied very well to each hole, making each round different from the last.

The game also has an obscene variety of customization. From the most obvious things, such as the time available for each shot, to the most bizarre ones, such as the option to lower gravity, swap your ball for an egg or a cube (!!!) or even swap the golf ball and hole for a basketball and hoop, Golf With Your Friends leaves the choice completely in the players’ hands, and that is the game’s strongest point without a shadow of a doubt. There is even an option for power-ups to appear throughout the course, like the item boxes in a Mario Kart race that, when broken, give the player some secret weapon. You can also turn collision between the players’ balls on and off, and in a match with several people and collision on, things can get chaotic quickly.

With these qualities, Golf With Your Friends seems to be on a very good path, but then you start taking your shots and see that reality is harsh and sad. PLAYING this game is a chore because the controls are not precise enough, the camera often plays against you and leaves you in situations where it is literally impossible to look in the direction you want to aim, and each shot ends up being a frustration. To make matters worse, since the game has no variations in the courses (such as, for example, wind blowing in a random direction each round), you can memorize the direction and power of the first shot and repeat it in every match to get a hole-in-one, that is, a hole in a single stroke. This makes online matches super boring because there is always that person in the room who makes every shot perfectly, and there is nothing anyone can do.

You can play offline by passing the controller from hand to hand, but this also quickly becomes boring because the order in which players take their shots is always the same, which puts player 1 at a complete disadvantage, followed by player 2, and so on. By the time player 4 takes his first shot, he has already been able to watch the three previous ones and can adjust his aim and power based on what he saw. Of course, players can agree not to watch each other’s shots, but for a game that is made to entertain and for friends to laugh in each other’s faces on every shot, that makes no sense whatsoever. It would have been enough to simply have the shot order defined by score (whoever is winning goes first) or to make the order random; anything but what actually happens in the game would have been a better solution. Playing online this problem does not exist, but that is no excuse.

In the normal game mode, each player has a total of 2 minutes to take their shots, but this has two stupid problems. First, when playing offline, the game tells you to “pass the controller”, and the current player must confirm that they have the controller in hand for the time to start counting, but during this screen you can freely aim the ball. That is, you can aim without the clock running and the whole concept goes down the drain. Again, this is easily solved by forbidding the player from looking at the screen during that time, but that makes little sense and the game should have taken care of it. The worst part, however, is that the time keeps counting while the ball is rolling. Once, a ghost that circles a table in one of the haunted mansion courses decided to keep carrying my ball back and forth and all I could do was watch my 2 minutes go by and lose that hole because of the time. It makes no sense for the time to count while the ball is traveling.

All in all, I had some good laughs with Golf With Your Friends, but for every laugh there were two or three complaints or frustrations. The graphics, worthy of a PlayStation 2, don’t help much either. To make matters worse, on an important shot the game’s physics betrayed me and the ball hit a wall head-on and made a completely senseless curve, totally ruining my score. A golf game needs, at the very least, to have its physics done right and without a single bug, otherwise the whole experience goes down the drain.

Playing this game with friends on the couch, passing the controller from one hand to the other, can be quite funny, but practically anything becomes funny when you are with your friends. Once, two friends and I laughed until we couldn’t take it anymore holding a contest to see who could break a piece of wood by headbutting it. Stupid? Yes, completely stupid, but funny; after all, practically any garbage becomes funny when you are with your friends. And that is what Golf With Your Friends is: the equivalent of banging your head against a piece of wood until someone gets hurt. It can be funny and even fun for a moment, because you are doing it with your friends, but soon you realize you are just doing something idiotic, and your time could be much better spent on something else.