Vertiginous Golf

My first thought loading this up was that someone had crammed a BioShock Infinite side-quest into a crazy golf cabinet, and honestly that comparison holds up better than it should. You start in a rain-soaked Victorian parlour, sit down in an electric chair, and get zapped into floating cloud courses where the working class of Scudborough can experience life above the smog through a virtual reality golf simulation. It is one of the more committed aesthetic premises in the indie sports genre, and for a good while it genuinely works. The course design is where the game earns its keep and also where it most reliably loses people. You get 54 holes spread across stroke play, a driving range, race tracks, and battle arenas. The holes themselves are multi-tiered puzzle boxes stuffed with conveyor belts, steam tubes, fans, propellers, and ramps that lead to nowhere in particular. To help you plan shots, a mechanical hummingbird lets you scout the layout in first-person before you swing, and a jewel-encrusted beetle lets you nudge the ball mid-flight. A limited rewind meter can claw back bad shots too, though it drains fast and will not save you from the bigger disasters. These tools feel clever in theory. In practice, the levels get dense enough that even a full reconnaissance flight with the hummingbird does not tell you where a mis-hit will actually land. A lot of critics and players landed on the same frustration: the holes become more labyrinthine than puzzling, and brute-force power often works better than any thoughtful line you scout out. For a Saturday night group session, though, the rough edges actually work in the game's favour. Local pass-and-play supports up to four players on the same machine, which is the right format for this kind of chaotic mini-golf. Watching a friend confidently line up a wedge shot and balloon it off the edge of a floating island never stops being funny. The battle arena mode online throws in weapons like tornadoes and slime to sabotage opponents, but note that those offensive tools are locked to online play - local pass-and-play is standard stroke golf only, no sabotage. Online servers have been quiet for years, so if you want the chaos weapons you may struggle to find opponents unless you have friends to invite directly. Control feel is the sticking point for more serious players. The swing pull-back is noticeably jerky, making it easy to overshoot short putts, and the camera inside walled-off sections of holes can flip to an obscured angle at the worst moments. Controller support is present and tested with standard Xbox pads, and mouse-and-keyboard works too, though neither input method fully solves the twitchiness. There is also a course creator and Steam Workshop support for community-made holes, which extends the shelf life well beyond the base 54, assuming you are willing to dig into it. Cosmetic customisation for your avatar, clubs, and hummingbird companion lives in a shop called Frolich's Emporium, though your golfer is invisible on the courses anyway, so it is largely a window-dressing feature. Who is this actually for? Casual groups who want something unusual to pass around on a laptop at a gathering will get a session or two of genuine laughs out of it. Solo players who enjoy puzzle-flavoured golf and can forgive stiff controls will find the course design rewarding enough to push through. Anyone expecting a smooth, well-tuned sim or a lively online community will walk away disappointed. The steampunk atmosphere and the sheer oddness of the concept carry it further than the raw mechanics deserve, and at the sub-five-pound tier it sits in, the ask is low enough that a single entertaining evening justifies it.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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