3D MiniGolf Review

One of the beautiful parts of playing video games is escapism: the ability to lose yourself in some exciting adventure or activity that would never be possible by yourself, be it in the vastness of outer space, the heat of the desert, or the chill of the bayou. 3D MiniGolf is nothing like that, as it's based on something you can do yourself in the real world with three-dimensional people for about the same cost as this game. How does this stack up against the real thing?

To be completely frank: horribly. A reviewer shouldn't reveal their cards so early in the game, but an exception can be made for 3D MiniGolf, as this game is such an out-and-out technical mess that it deserves a thorough shaming. The developers Z-Software allege on the game's Steam page that this is a low-maintenance game, and that one doesn't need to have the best computer to run it. Requiring only 2GB of RAM and a 2GHz processor, you would think that it wouldn't tax the average computer. How naive of you.

The specs of my computer are good enough to run the game, but when I started, I was appalled to see just how slow it was. On the main menu, it takes a good 2-3 seconds before the game highlights any of the menu options that the player runs their mouse over. Not that you'll be able to click many of them with ease, as, oddly, the hitboxes for all of these choices are skewed to the left by 100 pixels. This means you'll be trying to click on a little arrow, get frustrated that it isn't working, run your mouse over the entirety of the screen and then discovered that the place to actually click the option isn't at the place you thought it was! How bad do you need to be at programming that you end up screwing up the menus to the point where they're slow and unresponsive?! Stellar Stone made the worst game of all time, Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing, and even the menus worked there. How do you mess up so badly? I really hope someone over at Z-Software is getting fired right now. Preferably from a cannon.

But you're a shrewd and canny gamer. “I'll just tinker with the visual settings,” you say, “that ought to do it.”. You'd think that, wouldn't you? Hilariously, this doesn't make the game any less slow; ultimately resulting in turning it into a broken red and white hellscape that looks like something out of a rejected Nirvana video. At best, reducing the resolution and the graphical quality will make the ground look like red arid sand, and the trees a bit funny, but at worst, the green that you're playing on disappears entirely, leaving behind nothing but a white void, which critically makes the game unplayable.


Good luck putting this one when you can't even see the hole! Outstanding.
However, the lucky people that do get it to work will find a fairly humdrum mini-golf experience. The ball moves at varying speeds dictated by how hard you hit it, and if it goes in the right direction, it'll go in the hole. It's totally functional: or it would be if players could both see what they're doing and wrestle with the menu for long enough to get into the game. 3D MiniGolf would have been a totally passable game – an easy 5.5 on our scale – but it is unlikely that players will be willing to suffer through a game that may or may not work so that they may or may not have fun.

It appears that Z-Software wanted to bring a lot of ideas to the table, but just didn't have the technical expertise. 3D MiniGolf “boasts” three distinct courses with 54 different holes to play on, with the courses taking on distinct and experimental themes such as beach, campsite, and...regular mini golf course. Other dazzling innovations attempted are a 2 player game, and a tournament mode in which you fight it out with 7 AI characters. This is the most laughable part of the game, as AI characters are neither seen nor heard, yet all seem incapable of having a decent game. In the easiest hole of the game, a straight green with no gradients that's dead simple to hole-in-one caused nearly every single competitor to score 6 over par. Why is this embarrassing? It's not because of terrible AI, because they never show up – it's embarrassing because the AI are nothing more than randomly generated statistics, just numbers. The developers couldn't figure out how to give an invisible player competitive stats to make them even seem like they were keeping up with you. What kind of tiny, child-like minds were behind this game?

Frankly, the developers should be embarrassed. Players should be embarrassed. I'm embarrassed that this turd is going to stain my Steam Library forever. This is a terrible, terrible game, comparable to Big Rigs and Hong Kong '97 for being a horribly planned out mess where players – people who have paid real money for this load of shit – have to get lucky to play the game they paid for! 3D MiniGolf is a monstrosity; a strong argument for refunds on Steam, and proof that just because you have the means to make games, doesn't necessarily mean you deserve to. Stay far away from this game. Instead, take the money you would have spent on this game, and play a real round of mini-golf. The graphics in real life are much better anyway.