At first glance Dangerous Golf seems like an extremely
shallow experience where explosions and destruction are the only appeal, but
there actually is a decent game hidden beneath all the rubble. It turns out that Dangerous Golf isn’t just
“Michael Bay Plays Golf”, but rather a surprisingly smart and well-crafted
puzzle game with destruction as a highlight.
The thrill is somewhat fleeting, though, and once you get numb to the
chaos the game can rapidly start to lose its luster. See all of the details here in our full Dangerous Golf review.Game Details
- Publisher: Three Fields Entertainment
- Developer: Three Fields Entertainment
- ESRB Rating: “E” for Everyone
- Genre: Puzzle
- Pros: Nice visuals; great destruction; satisfying; lots of content
- Cons: Kind of dumb, honestly; blowing stuff up gets old
- MSRP: $20
Originally released on June 3, 2016, Dangerous Golf was met
with a fairly tepid reaction and mediocre reviews as it had a fair number of
issues such as extremely long load times, poor difficulty balance, and general
performance problems. A patch has since
been released that fixes many of those issues as well as added a tutorial video
and changed some of the gameplay mechanics to make it easier to play. We are reviewing the game after that patch
with all of the fixes in place.
Dangerous Golf is a golf game (sort of) where you play in
small enclosed spaces full of valuable stuff and try to break as much of it as
you can before moving on to the next room.
Each round consists of a “drive” where you just take aim and send the
ball flying into the room, a “Smashbreaker” where your ball catches on fire and
you can steer it as it bounces around, and a putt where you have one
opportunity to sink it into the hole.
Putts are sort of interesting because they can be very straightforward –
as long as there isn’t anything in the way you’ll get it in every time, but you
earn more points by making bank shots and ricochets.
Dangerous Golf isn’t simply about randomly hitting the ball
and hoping for the best, though, as each room is more like a puzzle where you
have to take the right path through it to earn the highest possible score. Some objects are worth more points. Other objects might topple over and cause
more damage to the items around them.
And there are various bonuses like paint buckets and other things
scattered around sometimes that increase your score when they make a mess. By knowing where all of the key items are,
how to use them properly, and how to cause the most damage in the most efficient
way possible, your scores will be much higher.
There is a deceptive amount of strategy and skill involved in Dangerous
Golf if you want to play it well.
There is also a surprisingly large amount of content in
Dangerous Golf. There are a bunch of
different levels including fancy dining rooms, restaurant kitchens, gas
stations, and more with multiple layouts and variations of each, adding up to
100 different holes to play through and set high scores. There is quite a bit of variety, too, as the
holes get more complicated and difficult, but you also unlock new abilities
like teleporters. You can play in
single-player as well as a single controller local multiplayer where you take
turns to compete for high scores.
For as varied as the holes can be and as strategic as the
gameplay is once you start digging into it, however, Dangerous Golf still has a
glaring problem and that is the fact the core concept itself simply doesn’t
really have legs. It is definitely fun
and funny for a while and it isn’t nearly as shallow as we’d feared when it was
first announced, but destruction for destruction’s sake can only last so long
before the thrill is gone.
One area you can’t really complain about is the fantastic
presentation in Dangerous Golf. It
looks gorgeous thanks to Unreal Engine 4 with great lighting and special
effects and a ton of detail just about everywhere you look. The punk rock soundtrack and overall
attitude also works well with the action onscreen and serves as a nice sort of
“F-you!” to the normal snobby golf establishment.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
