Golf With Your Friends Review for Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Blacklight Interactive
Published By: Team17
Catagories: Golf, Party Game
Release Date: 05.19.20

Lets get this out of the way, I am terrible at minigolf. Terrible at it playing it in real life, and terrible at it while playing Golf With Your Friends. Regardless, I enjoy myself playing it, there’s a harmless fun in playing minigolf with it’s goofy themes and unnatural hazards. If you like minigolf, good. Golf With Your Friends is for all intents and purposes a pure digital version the game.

GOLF

When looking at Golf With Your Friends at a skin deep level, you’re going to get exactly what you came for. Twelve courses (with one of them being unlockable), each holding Eighteen holes. Luckily, only the first of these courses; Forest remotely resembles the standard minigolf course one would go to in real life. The other eleven themes range from a Haunted Mansion, to a Museum, Candyland, even a course based on the Worms series. Each course outside of their theme has it’s own gimmicks or hazards, like the Worms course requiring you to roll into landmines to get pushed up to higher levels, or requiring you to skip water in order to get closer to the hole. If you’re not good at minigolf (like me), these aren’t going to help you one bit, but the variety is appreciated nonetheless and it keeps from the game getting boring. This cannot be said about anything in the game regarding how it looks or sounds, with music and graphics being rather unremarkable and bland.

WITH

Say you’re bored of just standard minigolf, even with the different courses, the pre-game settings can alleviate this. Want to mess around with the gravity, go nuts. Want to make your golf balls into cones or cubes, enjoy that. How about changing the size of your ball, have it your way. These changes almost all exist to make it harder to get PAR or anything but bogeys, making what was mostly a standard videogame based off of minigolf, into a crazy party game. On top of this, you can change the mode of play for each course. Among these modes include the option to make minigolf more like basket ball using a jump mechanic, or making it closer to hockey. Much like changing how the ball moves, flies, or looks, these modes just seem like more ways to make the game more exciting and harder.

YOUR FRIENDS

As the name of the game, Golf With Your Friends says plainly, multiplayer is also a key component to the your experience. The fun party mode like extras make even more sense when playing with up to twelve friends online and offline. One of the other extra modes in order to spice up the game, which would not make sense in a solo playthrough, but with friends is the game’s own Party Mode. This mode makes your minigolf session into a game of Mario Kart with powerup boxes littered through stages giving you honey traps, the power to freeze yourself in place to not fly off the stage or go backwards. While the game in solo is fun enough, especially if one likes minigolf, mixing the extra modes, the customization settings, and a handful of friends together for a course or two makes it into a random, exciting, mess of fun.

Of course, when playing alone, you wouldn’t want to get you and the other players’ balls get mixed up, so luckily there are cosmetic customization too, which only effects the looks of your ball as opposed to changing how the game plays. While when first starting, you can only change the color of your ball, beating a course unlocks variety of hats, pool floaties, to even the trail behind your ball. These show off more of the game’s true colors as a party game as opposed to just a minigolf simulator.