What The Golf? (Review)
Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £15.49
Where To Get It: Steam
I dislike Golf. I don’t get it. I don’t like it. I don’t like many of the people who play it, because it is the sport of the bourgeoisie, and honestly? Fuck those guys. But I have realised I hate What The Golf, a game that is only tangenitally about golf, in that you have a power and direction to your swing, and environmental bullshit in the way… More.
Not because it’s a bad game. It really, really isn’t. Not because I don’t like its sense of humour, its playfulness. Nope. It’s because it made me race that fucking sheep. It made me play Flappy Golf. At some point, it might make me play Golf Doom, and I will die a lot (unlike in Doom), and I’ll get irritable.
And so, the rant is over, and we get to what’s fun about this. In short, it’s a combination of the aforementioned humour and playfulness (the Not-Mario level, for example, has “What The Golf” being sung to the tune of our well beloved plumber’s 1-1 theme), a solid, low poly aesthetic with real charm to it, and surprising you at almost every turn with whatever zany thing you’re going to do with the basic mechanic of “Hold the mouse away from the direction you want to go, further away = stronger.”
The aforementioned flappy golf is one of the annoying ones, but one that made me laugh was the one where the pointer was the thing that got thrown around. Or maybe that couch launching ragdoll one. Those are two good early examples.
Design wise, it’s pretty accessible. Clear colour differences, level objectives are pretty clear, the aesthetics are pretty good… My only major gripe is that the difficulty, especially with the crown levels, is highly variable, even early on, and that it’s not made clear that playing a level multiple times (three times, each a variation) can be done.
So yes, What the Golf? has its flaws, but is overall a good game, sometimes fast paced and twitch, sometimes calm, and often funny… But I still find myself grinding my teeth, even as I acknowledge it’s a good game.
The Mad Welshman well remembers a friend from his youth who got some use out of golf. He used to collect discarded golf balls, break ’em open, and sell the rubber bands. Good pocket money, really.