![]() ![]() It's also rather sloppy at joining up parts of different height, so this is a feature for shallow tinkering rather than dedicated design. Rather than allowing you to improve on what's already provided, your creations will always be poor cousins to the main event. You get a paltry spread of ramps, corners and junctions to slap together in a grid, but there's no way of adding any of the wacky themed content that is so central to the game's appeal. There's a level editor, so you can create your own courses and include them in the line-up for online games, but it's a frustratingly clunky little side-dish. To prolong your pleasure you can share your holes with friends but. You can carefully putt around this course - or just use that tree next to you for an easy hole-in-one. The fact that, within only a few hours of the game going live, there were people topping the leaderboards with scores of 70 under par or more suggests that this feature can only damage the game's long term appeal rather than enhance it. The gameplay thus shifts from being a test of your golfing skill, crazy or otherwise, and instead becomes a race to simply find and hit the sweet spot first. ![]() ![]() Even after my first play through, there were at least six or seven holes that I could ace simply by memorising the best angle and power for the one shot needed to make the game do all the hard work. Some are harder to find and hit than others but, once discovered and mastered, they render the holes in question pretty much pointless. Pretty much every hole has a hidden "trick shot", a specific item or shortcut that - when hit - drops the ball in the hole for you. The second irritant is perhaps even more baffling. This problem recurs sporadically, in various forms, but always leaves you feeling that any attempt to play even a semi-serious game can be undone at any moment in the name of half-hearted zaniness. By your sixth, seventh, eighth game the chuckles have dried up. Now, I'll happily accept that crazy golf, by its nature, requires a certain amount of craziness but going over par because of something you had no control over is only funny a couple of times. Skittering about in a semi-random fashion, they'll also attack the ball if it comes close, shunting it across the green. The first you'll come across are scorpions, wandering around the holes of the cowboy-themed courses. In fact, there are two features of the game that, were they removed, would greatly increase the playability and longevity of the title.įirst is the inclusion of unpredictable obstacles. In fact, after playing through all of them (a feat which should only take a few hours) I wasn't seized with a burning desire to revisit many of them again. Thirty-six holes are on offer, across three themed zones, and at first glance that would appear to be a decent enough spread. Wallop your ball on this tiny planet, and watch it orbit off into space. Two male, two female and all brought to animated life with a stylised design in between the realistic proportions of a Tiger Woods, and the super-deformed manga look of Everybody's Golf, but with precious little in the way of personality. Only four characters to choose from, for instance, and quite a generic selection at that. The available options fall somewhere south of what you'd want from a full price title but nestle snugly in the niche marked "quite acceptable for an 800 point download". but then I'd have to think even harder about how to start the review, and where would that get us? Nowhere. (And, yes, I realise that the "minigolf" name has probably been used since that's what most American gamers call this peculiar pastime. Diverting and moderately engaging, certainly, but never reaching the levels of instantly gratifying hilarity you'd expect from a game that sees you putting away on fairground rides, in wild west towns full of dynamite or in the low gravity environs of outer space. ![]() It's rather revealing that this latest Live Arcade excursion into the realms of casual multiplayer amusement goes by the more mundane title of "minigolf" rather than the more traditional "crazy golf".įor all its bright colours and incessant upbeat muzak, and despite mostly acceptable controls and ball physics, it's a curiously inert affair. ![]()
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