What The Golf? – review
4 min read
Golf simulations have a particular audience, a hard core of hard and pure fans who like to spend hours calculating the incidence of the wind, the inclination of the greens and the statistics of each course …. which must be a faithful reproduction to the original track, woe to put a tree out of place. For them, the PGA Tour series has always been a boon, albeit with some decidedly negative chapters. After the passage of testimonials between Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy in 2015, Electronic Arts has decided to suspend its publication so fans have nothing left but to turn to arcade games such as Everybody's Golf. The immediacy of the gameplay of the Clap Hanz series has conquered everyone since the era of the first PlayStation, but the explosion of the Mobile market has brought to the fore a myriad of equally good and in some ways even more accessible titles, both from the point of view practical than cheap.
Despite this abundance of choices, there is still a large section of the public who, at the mere hearing of the word “golf”, has unusual hives. What The Golf? dedicated to them. The title already suggests something strange (“What The F ** k” in English a phrase that in an elegant way can translate to “But what the hell”) but only once you start playing do you realize how much this game is far from the real sport. He looks like an illegitimate child of the aforementioned Everybody's Golf with Katamari Damacy, who removes any point of reference: score, set of clubs, weather events and even the final ranking.
WHAT THE GOLF?
- Developer: Triband
- Publisher: Triband
- Availability: September 23 – PC, Switch, Apple Arcade, iOS
- Tested version: PC
The goal in What The Golf? not even to put the ball in the hole … just get there and touch it, by any means. Yes, because in this pastel-colored madness each hole is different from the others and we could spend the next 2000 characters listing the incredible fantasy exercises that the guys of the Triband team. Sometimes it will be the golfer himself to play the part of the ball, being slammed to the right and left along the course. Another hole instead puts dozens of balls into the field and you will have to aim with all at the same time, you just need to lead one to the end to win. In addition to changing rules from time to time, What The Golf? you will also face a series of obstacles that will make reaching the flag more and more difficult.
The simplest PC control system you can think of. Just hold down the left mouse button to choose shot power and direction, then release it to start the shot. The peculiarity lies in the fact that having to deal with a different object every time, you will often have to calculate its weight (a ceramic vase flies much less than a ball and much more fragile) and the inertia of movement (have you ever tried to control a wheelchair with one click). This aspect has been carefully taken care of by the developers, who from time to time have brought out some ingenious gameplay solutions that would have deserved much more space. the case, for example, of the hole in which instead of the ball a barrel of gunpowder must be managed which is overturned with each stroke. This means that in addition to having to choose power and direction it is also necessary to hurry in order not to detonate everything.
Rather than organize it all in predefined courses, What The Golf? will project you into a real adventure that will start from a central sci-fi themed hub. The nice thing is that the hub itself is a golf course where you will have to overcome other obstacles to open new routes and tracks. All even linked by a plot, obviously out of your mind, which is told by the on-board computers with which you “collide” during the exploration of the different thematic areas. In each of them you will find more or less veiled quotes from other video games that we invite you to discover.
All this is very fun and quite long-lived, even if the infinite replayability typical of normal golf games is quite another thing as What The Golf? it lacks any multiplayer mode. It will not take you more than 4 hours to complete all the holes, but luckily you can replay them to try to conquer the additional trophies. The first will be assigned to you simply by completing it while for the second you will have to beat the minimum number of hits, the classic PAR. The third perfectly in line with the rest of the production and will change from time to time, expect everything. On PC there is also a category of more difficult levels designed especially for streamers, if you want to take a look at them we recommend you look for them on Twitch and you will have a minimum idea of what level of madness they can reach.
Consider What The Golf? a real game of golf not possible. It belongs to a category of its own and this is already a merit. If it had a quantity of content at least equal to its originality at this point we would be talking about a new Instant Classic. We hope that the guys from Triband decide to support it for a long time or maybe to put in the pipeline a much more full-bodied and equally fun sequel.