REVIEW : WHAT THE GOLF? (PC)
The golf simulations have a particular audience, a hardcore of hard and pure fans who like to spend hours calculating the wind incidence, the pitch of the greens and the statistics of each course … which must be a faithful reproduction to the original layout, 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 no choice but to turn to arcade-style games like Everybody’s Golf.
Despite this abundance of choices, there is still a large slice of the public who just hear the word “golf” get rash bouts of urticaria. What The Golf? It is dedicated to them. Already the title suggests something strange but only once you start playing do you realize how much this game is far from the actual sport. It looks like an illegitimate child of the aforementioned Everybody’s Golf with Katamari Damacy, which takes all benchmarks out of the way: score, set of clubs, weather events and even the final ranking.
The goal in What The Golf? it’s not even that of putting the ball in the hole just get there and touch it, by any means. Yes, because in this pastel-coloured madness every 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 the golfer himself will play the part of the ball, being slammed left and right along the course. Another hole instead puts in the field dozens of balls and you will have to aim with all of them at the same time, you just need to lead one to the end to win. In addition to changing the rules from time to time, What The Golf? it will also put you in front of a series of obstacles that will make reaching the flag more and more difficult.
The PC control system is the simplest you can think of. Just hold down the left mouse button to choose the 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 and the inertia of movement. This aspect has been taken care of very carefully by the developers, who from time to time have come up with some ingenious gameplay solutions that would have deserved much more space. This is the case, for example, of the hole in which instead of the ball you have to manage a barrel of gunpowder that is overturned with each shot.
Rather than organizing everything into predefined courses, What The Golf? it will throw you into a real adventure that will start from a central sci-fi themed hub. The beauty is that the hub itself is a golf course where you will have to overcome other obstacles to open new routes and tracks. Everything is even linked by a plot, obviously crazy, which is told by the on-board computers with which you will “collide” while exploring the different thematic areas. In each of them, you will find more or less veiled citations to 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? lacks any multiplayer modes. It won’t take you more than 4 hours to complete all the holes, but luckily you can replay them to try to win 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 is perfectly in line with the rest of the production and will change from time to time, expect everything.
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