“Destroying stuff is fun, but the game does not offer much more than this.”
Dangerous Golf is the debut game to come out of new indie studio Three Fields Entertainment. Made up of former Burnout developers, it is not surprise that Dangerous Golf is a game all about your ability to cause epic destruction. Leaving behind the craziness of Crash Mode in favour of the intricate and calculated medium of golf, the game is a pretty nutty new idea as you would expect. As a Burnout fan myself, I had to try it and see if it works.
The premise of the game is simple; score as many points as you can by destroying stuff with a golf ball. Fortunately the method for doing this is better thought out than it might initially sound. On your first hit of the ball you must hit a designated number of different objects in order to unlock your Smashbreaker. This has been ripped straight out of Burnout’s old Crash Mode, and basically lights your ball on fire as you bounce it around causing maximum destruction. You can slow time if you need to adjust and hit something precise, but when your Smashbreaker meter is depleted make sure you can see the finish flag. If you don’t sink the ball in the hole at the end of the level, you only get half points, making precision just as important to success as destruction.
Dangerous Golf has been developed in the Unreal 4 Engine, which as you may know is the one which has been used to create numerous ultra-realistic demos. Depending on what system you play the game on, you can see to different degrees the extent to which this has been utilised. PC is naturally the most impressive system for visuals, and the game looks incredible in this format. I however chose to play the game on Xbox One (for a reason which I will come back to later), but even in this lesser build the game looks fantastic. The intricacy with which objects have been designed is clear, but never more so than when you start to destroy things. Particles and physics are utilised heavily in Dangerous Golf, but it manages to never slow down, no matter how many amazing looking fragments are flying across your screen at any one time.
Your playgrounds of destruction in Dangerous Golf take you around the world. Sadly, you only get to visit very small rooms around the world, but you can travel none the less. France, England, the USA and Australia make an appearance, each drawing on localised stereotypes in their specific levels. France maps take place in palaces for example, with much gold, whereas England maps unfold in castles. The objects you can destroy in each are typical for them too, with champagne and artworks in France and suits of armour in England. Each country has a few maps, each of which in turn has a few different variants, so there is plenty to play through in theory. In practice, each country’s maps do feel a little bit samey and therefore limited. Their beautiful designs cannot be faulted, and the humour is clear, but a greater, more evident variety would have been very welcome.
Gameplay is the reason I decided to play this game on console rather than my more powerful PC. For one thing, I wanted to make use of the local multiplayer feature, which for myself and I am sure for many others is a lot easier to do on my Xbox. More importantly however, the game can only be played properly using a controller anyway, meaning that given my other desire the console option worked out to be the better one. It will really depend on your desires and what kit you have as to what will work out best for you, but it is worth bearing these features in mind when you decide.
The actual gameplay is relatively easy to control, but it does have some issues. For starters, despite starting out with a few easy levels, the game doesn’t intrinsically teach you how to play. There is a lot of trial and error as a result, with the only instructional material being a PlayStation 2-esqe button layout diagram for you to try and get on with. In fact, a lot of the menus and appearance of the game, along with features such as the length of loading screens, all make the game feel like it might be from an age gone by. Nevertheless, the general controls are easily learned, and most gameplay issues actually come from the camera itself. If you get too close to an object or a wall, it is particularly hard to see where you are relative to the rest of the room. It seems as though rather than fixing this issue, a feature to highlight objectives through obstacles was introduced instead. This seems a little lazy, but the feature does come in helpful when trying to find particular objects in the object-filled environments.
Destroying stuff is fun, but the game does not offer much more than this. You can shoot for high scores, play for fun both with and against friends and participate in a single or multiplayer world tour. World tour mode is literally just a means for the game to facilitate unlocking new maps and achievements though, and doesn’t contribute any kind of legitimate story to enjoy. Dangerous Golf is good fun and makes for easy entertainment for a fair few hours, but it can become repetitive and in essence is relatively limited. Perhaps one to pick up in a sale rather than pay full price for, even Burnout fans will realise that this one gameplay style alone, even with varied objectives such as point scoring flags, minigames and hidden objects to find, only holds up so well on its own.
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