The Golf Club Preview

Fresh air, green grass, sand, water and flags, lot’s of flags. No this is not a list of things that most of us fear while shut up in our dimly lit rooms, staring at our HD displays, but the very things that define Golf. A quiet sport, a sport best suited to a sunday afternoon. Capturing this side of the pastime in digital form has always been a struggle and while this is something The Golf Club does well, it’s what isn’t there at the moment that stood out in my short time with the game, that defines it.

What’s here works like a dream. I had no issues, apart from a small one where the game defaulted to windowed mode and some problems with a multi-screen setup, but this is early days and I expect these kind of things are just teething problems. The game runs smoothly with no obvious frame drops. This is all fantastic stuff but here’s the thing, none of that matters. The thing I want to focus on with this preview is what the game offers the player. What I got to play was a very small slice of the final game and so we’ll start with that.

I got to play 6 different courses that varied in location and length. This might not seem like much but I’ll explain why this doesn’t really matter a huge deal later. All the courses were, well, golf courses; nothing you haven’t seen before if you’re a fan of the sport or the video games. The core gameplay is, again, instantly familiar and this is far from a bad thing. There is very little you can do with a golf game that hasn’t been done before.

What is here beyond the main mechanics of any other golf game is the ability to adjust your shot, with a small box that appears when you swing, as to allow you to correct for wind direction and any other objects that may be in your way. Although this isn’t something entirely new in the genre it is executed pretty well.

The first thing that I noticed when I jumped into a course was the commentator. While a tad irritating, it felt very personal and in a very different tone to your average sports game. He constantly tells you your score, reconciles you when you miss by a hair on a putt and seems genuinely interested in your game. This may be to be seen as more social and personal than your average sports game, which brings me to the next point.

What is the reason for you to pick this game up instead of picking up a cheap Tiger Woods game instead? Well The Golf Club’s one big feature, the one it’s betting everything on, is the ability to create your own courses. When you open up the course creator tool you choose a couple of basic options to define your course, location, number of holes etc and a course is randomly generated for you. This is where the the real fun begins. You’re then given a large number of ways in which to alter and optimise your course to your liking.

The number of options is quite large ranging from a generic length of hole option to changing the height of an individual area of ground. Once the game is complete, it promises you the ability to share these courses with your friends and challenge them to score higher than you. The social elements are, at the moment, all inaccessible so if this will work is yet to be seen.

So really The Golf Club is a solid golf game trying to attract a social following. I can’t say I feel a social golf game is what everyone has been waiting for, but if a game is going to be that it’s The Golf Club.