Welcome to our review of Party golf, a new couch play game that excels in multiplayer!
Party Golf is all about 3 things. Hit the ball into the hole, Get it there as fast as possible, try to be clever at the same time. In this game, you obviously play Golf, but a simplistic kind of golf. You face off against 3 other computer players in the single-player mode and basically, you need to ace your shot as soon as possible.
Sounds simple, but it is often incredibly annoying, all due to randomly generated levels or should I say holes. All playable holes are generated on the spot in a 2D screen, a bit simplistic to my liking, but I will get back to that later on.
The gameplay itself is very simple and is basically reduced to a 2 button game. Ideal for Joy Con sharing and multiplayer mode. Just aim and shoot the ball. You can not “accurately” measure the speed of your shot, it is always the exact same, you influence speed and distance by the joy con stick. This can influence your shots up and downhill a lot. I did end up with several out of bounds (out of screen) balls in my first few minutes.
One big gripe, your ball messes up the trajectory of other players’ balls and vice versa. I really disliked this part, not because I can’t handle it, but because some levels, I was not even done aiming yet and bam, my ball ended up flying away, even in the wrong direction, because a computer player was quicker to shoot than me. This had nothing to do with speed or reaction time, it even happened once without even seeing the indicator that I was able to fire away my shot.
Once you do put the ball or anyone else does, you get a basic 10-second countdown, either put your ball in that period or you do not put it at all. This is pretty much the most fun I had playing this game, managing to put a ball within the final few seconds, seemingly out of nowhere.
When I compare this game to any other Golf game out there, the entire game just feels naked! Another golf game on Switch, excelling by its’ vast amount of amazing graphics and versatility, it is almost like Party Golf and Infinite mini golf are not the same genre… The Party Golf menus are felt bare bones and well, I always said that gameplay resulting in FUN is more important than what a game looks like, but this really felt bare bones…
A lot of the problems this game faces, they are being made up in a brilliant way by the multiplayer, where you do not face the issues from the single-player modes and the soundtrack does deserve some credit too. I often felt that this game just needed a redesign to really work. The random holes can be edited to your liking, but again the same gripes of the single-player mode come to mind…
But there is another side to this story, in multiplayer mode, this game was a lot more fun! It was something that made us laugh quite a bit, but sadly enough, there are so many cool multiplayer games out there already! Is Party Golf the right one? I honestly do not know…
In conclusion, I personally loved playing the multiplayer, but the single player never appealed to me. Due to the multiplayer, I am rating this game at 60%.
