Golf With Your Friends Review (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch & PC)

Golf should be a means to an end—an escape from a world consumed by technology and capitalism. In Golf With Your Friends, however, it isn’t quite so simple, nor is it the leisurely walk around the green that you want it to be. It isn’t a headache by any means, but it is everything you would expect a party-based mini golf game to be: a playground with no rules or regulations, no do-overs and certainly no opportunities to retaliate against your opponents when the ball ricochets from the hole and leaves you feeling like a caddie without the slightest clue about nine irons or wedges.

I can only truly describe Golf With Your Friends as a sandbox for teenage angst—a cesspit, if you will, where classic golf immediately becomes a relentless battle between youngsters who just can’t wait their turn to give the ball a good ‘ol whacking. Think of it as a mini golf course for impatient players. Sure enough, the goal remains the same—to sink a put and claim bragging rights over your peers. However, what sets Golf With Your Friends apart from, say, PGA, is that it doesn’t accommodate camaraderie and fair play. Instead, it opts for fast-paced, simultaneous action that allows everyone to take their shots with whatever clubs they so desperately wish to swing. To that end, it’s a bit like a toddler’s birthday party, in the sense that nobody has any interest in waiting their turn, and everyone would soon rather sink the hole so that they might scoot off to the pizza counter next door for post-game nibbles. It’s messy, chaotic, and weirdly, a lot of fun to slug through.

At the heart of Golf With Your Friends is an annoying yet stupidly entertaining twelve-player whack ‘em up experience that’s as equally sloppy as it is irresistibly more-ish. It isn’t a true representation of modern golf; it’s more of a caricature of the sport, if anything—a joke that knows how to laugh at itself as it entices you to swing along for the ride and take its nonsensical blueprint into your own backyard. It isn’t technical, and it certainly isn’t authentically apt. It is, for lack of a better description, a game that just wants you to have a bit of fun at the expense of your opponent’s ever-growing ego. Frankly, it doesn’t need to be more than that, either.

Combined with a generous selection of themed stages and a surprisingly in-depth level creator that allows for creative exploration, Golf With Your Friends does, in all fairness, provide a lot of bang for your buck. In addition to its sizable catalog of courses, it also adopts a gameplay system that is, while a little barebones and without the full weight of a classic golfing experience, incredibly easy to learn yet awfully difficult to master. With a lot of mindless button mashing and wishful thinking, it doesn’t necessarily capture the essence of golf I’ll admit. That said, where it lacks in authentic detail and technical innovation, it surprisingly makes up for in beginner-friendly mechanics and palpable controls. It isn’t the least bit complex — but it serves its purpose incredibly well, which counts for a lot.

As with a lot of multilayer games on the market, the friends you choose to play with are what truly make the experience. Naturally, the game has a solo mode, but, given the nature of the game and its rigorous nature, it isn’t something that you should entertain. Sure enough, it’s slower, quieter, and frankly, quite boring. But that isn’t what Golf With Your Friends is — at least if you’re looking to enjoy it for the PvP game that it is and should be. As the title openly implies, multiplayer is at the heart of the journey. And it’s the friends you have, regardless of whether or not they prefer to take turns and enjoy the smooth sailing feel, or if they prefer to throw caution to the wind and brazenly ignore the rules, that transform an otherwise ordinary PvP game into a custom affair that can adopt a variety of different play styles.

To give credit where it’s due, Golf With Your Friends features a treasure trove of fantastic courses to romp through, all of which contain hundreds of unique set pieces and themed puzzles to explore and overcome. Moreover, with enough DLC and custom maps to play with (and not to mention a level designer that houses countless faces to tweak and customize), the game as a whole has more than enough content to keep you distracted for hours, days, even weeks, provided you have the companions to endure the pandemonium with. It might not be the be all, end all of competitive sports, but to tell you the truth, it is a game that has a lot going for it. The devil is in the details, though: if you’re looking for an entertaining single-player experience that pours just as much heart and soul into its world as its primary multiplayer mode, then you might want to take your clubs to another green.

Verdict

Golf With Your Friends isn’t like your classic PGA experience; it’s like a rage room for the intoxicated—an underground cesspit for those who are morally inclined to unleash their inner Tiger Woods and tap into their ever-looming angst. It’s fast-paced action on a checkered green canvas—a thrill ride that makes no effort to provide you with the best possible experience or inflate your ego. It’s just golf. Hectic, unorthodox, mini golf, but with friends.

Considering the amount of content that you have to grovel around here, I’d say that Golf With Your Friends more than justifies the price tag. With a good amount of shelf life and an ever-expanding catalog of fresh courses and DLC to look forward to, you won’t find a shortage of holes to sink here, that’s for sure. The question is, will you be able to forgive your friends when all hell breaks loose out on the green?