The Golf Club - Review

When I first heard about The Golf Club, I was surprised that it was coming, I mean could an unknown developer make the truest version of golf like they promised?

After spending countless hours playing through the various modes, I can confirm that the team know their golf and it shows here. When you first load up the game, you will be presented with a very simplistic menu which show cases the main trend I noticed throughout the game. Golf is the reason why you are here and everything here is there to help you get to the game, something that is pretty amazing. The first highlighted square will allow you to drop straight into a game and that is what you should do first.

Upon loading up the first game, I noticed the game had a few presentation similarities to other golf games, it shows you the length of the hole, which is very helpful when you have a hole that goes around a corner. However there is something that other golf games did that this game does not, which is for the best and that is you don’t have to watch long shots of your player character getting ready for the shot. Again it highlights the fact that here it is all about golf and not showboating the player model.

Once you are ready to make your shot, the game will provide you with what it believes to be the best club for the shot, in most places in might be a driver, but it could throw you a 7 iron depending on the hole. In fact the game is really good at providing the best option for you and when I did think I knew better than the game and selected a club that was likely to give me the biggest range, I was usually proven wrong when the ball would not fly correctly. If you are 250 yards from the pin and the game gives you the club that has a maximum range of 110 yards, it is best to stick with it.

Actually completing the motion of hitting the ball is pretty straight forward, pull the right stick back and push it forward. Should you push the stick forward and take it off centre then there is a good chance you are going to shank the ball and send it out into the rough. In fact there is a little bit of skill required when you want to pull off the perfect shot, for your first swing you may want to go full power, which means you need to pull back until the club is all the way back and then push it forward in one motion and keeping it as straight as you can, quite a challenge really, but if you are successful you will get a feeling of triumph as the ball soars through the air.

Things get a little more complicated when you take to the putting green to attempt to get that elusive birdie. The putting mechanics are perhaps the most challenging part of the game, there is very little information to help you learn, you can only really take a trial and error approach. Thankfully the game does have on screen display markers that show where the green is sloping and how fast, which allows you to customise your shot, but again it’s a trial and error approach. One of the elements about the presentation of the game I found to be executed greatly was the sound design, just letting the game run will fill your room with the sounds one might find on a real golf course, birds chirping, wind rustling the trees and even the occasional lawn mower.

The best sound element though comes in the form of the announcer, in other games where it is super professional, The Golf Club presents a more laid back style, as if your mate was helping you out. When the announcer tells you information, the flow of the delivery is done so well that you might think it was done in real time. There was never a point in all that I heard where the audio felt disjointed in delivery, which for the amount of time I played was a treat, though the lack of announcers meant I heard the same guy each time.

One of the coolest parts of The Golf Club is the course creator, which actually uses software  that allows players to create a variety of courses, in fact the tool is so powerful, Greg Norman's course creation team have licenced the software for use to create real world courses. While you can chose the layout of each hole, the game will create the course for you first; you can change the layout later. You make choices that will impact how hard the courses are to play. Among the options you can tinker with are the amount of trees, the amount of water and just how the terrain varies in height, even the location of the course will change the way they play. Setting a course in the desert setting will generally provide you with more wind, because of the dry nature of a desert.

The course creator does allow you to randomise the layout of the course as often as you want, until you are happy with it. Once you are satisfied you can publish it online for others to try out and rate. Online is also quite robust when it comes to matches and plays, because you can play your friends online, but also compete against their ghosts and also join online clubs and leagues. There are a few things that bring the game down from being a truly excellent golfing game and they are minor, the lack of variety with the announcer does wear after time, but the main issue I found with the game were the lack of options for player customisation.

Overall The Golf Club presents golf at its most basic level, the game offers up the core tenants of the sport and delivers on them with amazing accuracy, it is just a shame that you can’t change your player looks around.

The Score

8.5

Review code provided by HB Studios

The Pros

+A pure golf experience

+Let's you just enjoy the game, without feeling bogged down by everything

The Cons

-If golf is not your thing

-The single announcer does get a bit old, quite quickly