Golf Club Wasteland (Xbox One)

Golf games really evade me, I’d never been into them properly. Only a few had taken to me quite a bit, mainly Links 2004, and Golf With Friends (With my friends at that).

Golf Club: Wasteland takes things at a nice slow pace, you find yourself playing on an apocalyptic earth whilst the rest of humanity has move to Mars. With 35 holes, each venturing through a slightly different landscape, you’ll go through abandoned parks, warehouses, apartment blocks and even skyscrapers.

The game has 3 modes of play, a story mode, where you can take your time with no consequences of going over a stroke count, so you can relax and enjoy the scenery and the really nice soundtrack. A challenge mode, which is very similar to story mode, but you’re limited to the amount of strokes you can play per course, with the ball exploding and you having to start again if you go over this limit. Lastly an Iron mode, which will require your expert golf skills with no mistakes, this is only unlockable after you’ve completed the challenge mode.

Playing is fairly straight forward with your left stick (Controller) to aim where you want to go and a button press to hit the ball, with a “Crazy” golf game like this, you won’t have to worry about using different clubs, etc. But an eye for a good shot and some nice angling will do you quite well here.

The courses themselves obviously increase in difficulty as you progress through the story, your skills will need to be honed in throughout these and some I found ridiculously challenging, but this was for maybe less than 5 courses. Sometimes you’ll have some unexpected visitors to the course, and you’ll sometimes spot some hidden shortcuts, bringing the par score down.

Each course has it’s own unlocks, mainly in the form of a diary which gives you backstory about the character you play, you also have to perform certain actions in game to unlock more of these entries also, give some more replayability to the game.

Visually the game is nice and simple, the colour palette is nice but maybe a bit bland. Pretty much what you expect in a post apocalyptic setting, but a few nice vibrant colours make their way into it, giving a good contrast. Your character is simply animated, but there was no issues with how he moved or any of the moving parts of the game. We also have some brief yet memorable side characters on some of the courses, with the squirrel being a favourite. These again are also animated nicely and keeps with the almost cute visual style.

The audio presentation is what’s gives this game its character, a nice varied soundtrack with some low-fi beats and some really nice dance tracks, and an accompanying radio station providing more backstory to what’s happened around you. Each course has it’s own radio piece of story and unique tracks, and there’s 35 courses so there’s a bit of variation in there too.

For its low price, you can sink a good few hours into Golf Club Wasteland and have a relaxing time, there’s some additional challenge there if you want to unlock everything it has to offer. As mentioned it looks nice and plays pretty well too. The audio is standout here providing soothing tracks and narration behind the gameplay. I had a nice time