Golf With Your Friends

Team 17, the company behind Worms, Moving Out and Overcooked, brings another title that truly lives up to its name, Golf With Your Friends.

Players compete in an 18 hole mini-golf game that offers a great entertainment, so long as you’re enjoying it with friends. The offline mode allows the player to enjoy a single-player game, however, it can quickly become unenjoyable and at times purely frustrating. This offline mode also allows for couch mode, something that adds a great element to the game, particularly those who enjoy gaming with friends and family in their own homes.

The online mode offers players the ability to party up and enjoy the madness of this title, where the frustrations encountered through single-player mode give way to a riot of laughter as you and your party endure the challenges of the course together.

Standard mini-golf rules are in effect during the normal standard play, with the player completing the course with the lowest amount of strokes taking the honors. After enjoying what the standard game and courses throw at you, the multitude of options available in the game setup helps add to the replayability. From timers for hole completion, stroke limits, and various penalties for non-completion of the hole or hitting it out of bounds, the options available will have you coming back for a second and third round in a single sitting to see who is crowned champion.

In addition to the game options available, players can opt to have “power-ups” added to the game. These offer unique abilities for a short duration, from changing the shape of the opponent’s balls into something that resembles a Pringles can, complete with all new physics that comes with it!

The varying courses can also offer an added challenge, a fairly straight forward “Forest” setting gives way to wild and wacky courses such as Pirates, Candyland, and even a Worms themed course.

There are a few nuances with the game, the camera control can be bothersome at times. Getting the right camera angle and even identifying the hole at times can be almost impossible, combined with some courses that resemble a maze, being unable to find the hole leaves the player feeling frustrated. This, combined with the lack of on-screen help, even in a simple tutorial, means that players will need to learn what things on the courses can be interacted with and most certainly, what consequences they have for interacting with them.

If hitting a golf ball into a hole doesn’t take your fancy, the game also offers various other game modes including “hockey”, where the ball and holes give way to a puck and a hockey goal – complete with the goalkeeper – and a “dunk” mode, where you need to jump the ball into the basket to complete the hole.

Players are also able to ‘pimp out’ the ball with cosmetic hats, which adds a colourful element to the multiplayer arena. Seeing a golf ball wearing a sombrero is quite cool when enjoying an online session with your friends. Additionally, a ‘trailer’ can also be added to the player’s ball which emits a trail as the ball moves on the course. The trailing particles are also part of the game world, knocking your opponent’s balls off course if they happen to cross their path.

Golf With Your Friends truly lives up to its name, a great little mini-golf game that is best enjoyed with your friends for a fun night of silliness that in these times, is just what the doctor ordered.

+ Couch mode

+ Hours of hilarity

+ Variety of gameplay options

+ Sheep!

– Physics can be annoying at times
– Soundtrack quickly becomes painful
– Could use some on-screen help.
– SHEEP!!

Score: 6/10