What the Golf? by developers Triband is the beautifully absurd fusion of Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Looney Tunes, leaning more towards the Looney Tunes than the actual golfing.
What the Golf?
Developer: Triband
Price: $19.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
What the Golf starts innocently enough, leading you to believe it’s a simple golf game with a cute aesthetic but after putting a few balls into some holes the game’s clever sense of humor becomes evidently clear as you go to hit the ball but it’s your character’s body that goes sailing into the air instead. It’s at this point where the game abandons any idea of pretending it’s a golf game and reveals itself as an exercise of how many jokes the developers can come up with and let me tell you, it’s a lot. Comedy in games is something that’s very hard to pull off. There can be a funny moment or joke in a game, but it’s difficult to find a game you could genuinely call a “comedy” in that it is repeatedly soliciting laughs from you as you’re playing through it. What the Golf accomplishes this in spades as each stupid pun or joke demands its reward of a hearty laugh and it’s more than likely going to get it from you. The game should last you maybe 3-4 hours and through that time I found myself not wanting to stop just to see what clever joke the game was going to drop next. The game’s eventual morbid sense of humor slowly creeps on you with moments like being able to see a loving family die in a house fire and turn to zombies far off in the background as you progress through a series of stages along with the increasingly sinister computer messages you can find littered throughout the game world.
When it comes to gameplay mechanics things are pretty straightforward: you hold a button down to aim your golf ball and adjust for the strength you want it to fire at. That’s the game distilled to its simplest, but it’s not that simple to describe. One level will have you controlling a golf ball while another might have you instead of playing as a house or even driving a car or in the first-person view. The game is so wildly varied in its mechanics that describing how it plays can be a difficult task, especially if you don’t want to spoil any jokes. The game even incorporates aesthetics and mechanics from other game series’ and manages to make them feel at home here. Time stopping shooter SUPERHOT makes an appearance here in a series of levels themed after the game and the marriage of mechanics just flat out works. I can’t stress enough the creativity on display here in this game that continues to surprise and impress with each level you go through.
The game itself is set in a sort of laboratory you move through that’s sectioned off into 10 zones, each with around a dozen levels you need to complete before you can move to the next zone by fighting a computer overlord in a series of simplistic, but entertaining “battles”. Moving the golf ball in this overworld is done the same way you control it in actual levels, by holding the button down and adjusting the strength you want it to shoot off. Normally this is fine when in the actual puzzle levels, but out in the world, it makes traversal a bit cumbersome as you’re repeatedly get stuck on static geometry on a near-constant basis. There’s never a moment where you use these “golf controls” for any sort of mechanic while in the world so it surprises me that they didn’t allow you to control the ball by simply rolling around. Admittedly I’m probably making this out to be a bigger deal than it really is, but it’s a speedbump in a game that goes at a pretty steady pace: it’s not going to ruin your day when you hit it but you’re definitely going to be upset about it.
Each level also has two additional stages beyond it. Half the time the second stage is simply repeating the first but doing it under par, with the third stage being something radically different. However, sometimes both the second and third stages are completely new stages. Considering each of the 10 zones has an average of 12 levels, doing these additional stages drastically bumps the count up and some of the game’s best stuff is hidden in the second or third stage of a level. I regularly found myself finishing a level, then jumping back into it to see what the next two stages would look like, since many times they’d have their own gimmick you’d never get the chance to see if you had just skipped it.
What’s probably the coolest feature the game has however is the “Show a Friend” mode. Here, the game skips the filler and throws you into a quick mashup of various levels from the entire campaign as a sort of “demo mode” to show any friends who may come over. It’s a great way of showcasing the game that helps advertise exactly what sort of game it is, that just lets you throw a controller in a friend’s hands and let them go at it.
The Final Word
What the Golf is easily the dumbest game you’re going to play all year, and I say that with all the love in the world.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
