House of Golf 2

I'll be straight with you: mini-golf games are not my genre. I'm the guy who gets tilted by bad netcode and obsesses over frame timing, so sitting down with a casual couch game about putting through a child's bedroom felt like a working holiday. What I found was more interesting than expected, and also more limited than the marketing wants you to think. The core loop is cleaner than most in the genre. You set your aim direction and charge a power gauge independently before committing to the shot, which means you actually have a moment to think rather than panicking through a three-click stroke meter. A free camera lets you scout the entire hole before you putt, and on the more complex courses - kitchen counters, garage shelves stacked with tools, living rooms full of furniture - you genuinely need that reconnaissance. Progression is locked behind bronze, silver, and gold trophies earned in mini-tournaments: get enough trophies and new courses open up. It creates a difficulty ramp that starts friendly and gets properly stubborn by the late stages. Ball physics are mostly solid, though a few reviewers have noted the occasional inconsistency, and out-of-bounds restarts can feel harsh when the ball clips through an obstacle rather than bouncing off it. The Trick Score system is the game's actual personality. Instead of just chasing par, you can earn bonus points by finding hidden medals on alternate routes, pulling off ricochets, threading the ball through gaps, or taking the chaotic high-power line across a void instead of the obvious path. That tension between stroke efficiency and trick-score padding is the most interesting decision space in the whole game, and it is what separates House of Golf 2 from the pile of generic crazy-golf releases. Visually, the game runs on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen lighting, and it shows - the household environments are genuinely photorealistic in places, which makes the shrunken-down perspective land better than it has any right to. Here is the problem, and it is a real one for anyone buying this on PC to play with friends remotely: there is no online multiplayer. Multiplayer is strictly local, up to four players passing a controller or keyboard on the same machine. Live Tournaments exist and add rotating courses with leaderboard competition, which partially fills the gap, but if your crew is not in the same room you are essentially buying a solo puzzle game with a party-game aesthetic. The solo content runs roughly 8 to 10 hours to completion, which is a reasonable runtime but leaves the replay value resting almost entirely on couch sessions and weekly tournament chasing. For a PC-centric audience, that is a meaningful caveat. Bottom line for the shooter crowd reading this: it is genuinely relaxing between ranked sessions, the Trick Score hunting scratches a similar itch to finding off-angles and unconventional plays, and the visuals are legitimately impressive for the budget. Just do not buy it expecting an online competitive mode that does not exist.

Fred · Scout Team

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