Golf Gang is a crazy version of mini golf with weird and wonderful tracks and everyone teeing off all at once. The 1-8 player online battles are frantic and fun and are full variety, meaning that Golf Gang has plenty to offer the casual player and anyone looking for the party vibes.
Golf Gang comes with six courses of 18 holes out the box although you’ll unlock everything after the first one through coins (the thresholds are very low, you’ll unlock them naturally). You can play each course in front and back 9, the full 18 or a random selection of 9 and three modes are on offer. You can play the usual stroke play – how few hits does it take to get the ball in the cup. You can also switch it up to race mode where strokes don’t matter, its all about time. The best mode though is Golf Gang which merges both together. As everyone plays at once, you can battle for speed or efficiency. After each hole, your position in each mode is scored and the player with the lowest score after all the holes wins.
Golf Gang mode opens up lots of minor strategy decisions as you can have UI tell you what’s going on with your competitors as you play. Maybe you can afford to take more time or wait for the ball to stop rolling rather than frantically pounding out the shots if your friends have shot off course into the water. Its entirely up to you.
Control wise, Golf Gang plays much better with mouse controls rather than gamepad as it feels more precise and kinetic. You click and hold the mouse and pull back to gauge your power and then let go to make your shot. When not clicking to gauge the power, your mouse changes the camera. You get very used to constantly moving things around in motion and it feels a bit like a golf version of Trackmania when everyone’s balls are flying together. You can turn collisions on and off to suit.
Alongside collisions, there are a lot of mutators you can unlock too. Explosive collisions, low gravity and high speed balls are some of the 20+ things you can switch in and out in groups and you can do this in the easy to set up lobbies before diving into a match. During the match you can have chat going too which is nice and your golf ball is customisable with the more expensive unlocks which will take a few rounds to afford such as trails, eyes, colour and hats.
One thing that will take a while to get going is the online mod community. Steam workshop is enabled to make new courses but you’ll need to download some additional tools. Some of the first courses out are quite impressive (Old Castle) but the learning curve is quite steep. It does open the game up to tons of replayability beyond what is already a great game though.
I don’t really have any negatives for Golf Gang aside from some controller specific annoyances which I negated by moving to mouse control. It is bright, colourful, easy to understand and a good laugh too. I’ve now had a few online games with random people online since the video review and am pleased to say it ran smoothly although the max I’ve played with is a party of 4 so far. I hope those that enjoyed Golf With Friends will take a look at this gem too.
Review copy provided by developer.
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