Dangerous Golf

My first thought booting this up was: someone finally let the Burnout team do whatever they wanted, and they made a golf game. That instinct turns out to be literally true. Three Fields Entertainment was founded by ex-Criterion directors Fiona Sperry and Alex Ward, the people behind Burnout 3 Takedown and Burnout Paradise, and Dangerous Golf is basically Crash Mode transplanted into four trashed indoor locations. The core loop is three phases per hole: tee shot, SmashBreaker, putt. You line up a shot, launch the ball into a room full of breakable props, and the monetary value of what you destroy becomes your score. Rack up enough damage off the tee and you unlock the SmashBreaker, which turns the ball into a steerable fireball in slow motion. Steer it into grand pianos, suits of armour, grandfather clocks, and dishwashers. Then putt. Sink it and you keep everything; miss and the game cuts your score in half. That putt stakes mechanic adds genuine tension to something that looks brainless from the outside. Spread across 100 holes in 10 tours, the four locations - Kitchen, Castle, Palace, and Gas Station - each have sub-rooms that open as you progress, and the game layers in tricks like glue shots (which let you ping the ball from multiple tee positions), teleporters, bomb plants, and hazard zones that kill your run on contact. It is not deep, but it is wider than it first looks. The SmashBreaker controls are where most frustration lives: the ball does not always go where you nudge it, camera angles occasionally block sight lines on key objects, and the physics have a randomness that critics consistently flagged. Some players find that unpredictability charming. Others find it aggravating, especially in the score-attack single-player grind where repeating a hole means sitting through a loading screen. The July 2016 patch smoothed out the worst offenders - faster restarts, 360-degree aim, a tutorial - so if you read early reviews that were unkind, the game shipped in better shape than those scores reflect. For a Saturday night with three friends and a pile of controllers, this thing genuinely delivers. The local pass-the-pad Party Golf mode supports up to four players, and the co-op World Tour lets two players share a scene sequentially, which works brilliantly for mixed-skill groups because neither person is watching the other fail in real time. Online play goes up to eight, though at this point in the game's life that lobby may be quiet. The accessibility bar is low: there are no clubs to manage, no stats to build, no tutorials to sit through before the chaos starts. Hand anyone a controller and they understand within two holes. For the solo player, the appeal compresses faster. The novelty of the destruction is real but finite, and once you have seen a kitchen get wrecked a dozen times the hunt for gold medals starts to feel like homework. The Metacritic score of 54 and the critic split (only about one in five recommended it at OpenCritic) tell you this is a divisive one. Player scores on Steam land warmer at roughly 73 percent positive, and that gap makes sense: critics played it long enough to feel the repetition; casual players dip in for an hour and have a great time. If you are measuring it as a party game and a stress-relief toy, the score is unfairly harsh. If you are measuring it as a complete, replayable single-player experience, the critics have a point. Go in knowing which camp you are shopping for.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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