After moving from Xbox 360 to Xbox One we have seen many genres and types of games make the crossover, sports game are no different with Football, American Football and Hockey all making the leap to name just 3. But one sport has yet to make its Xbox One debut, finally after just over 10 months since launch, golf arrives on the Xbox One in the form of the “The Golf Club” from HB Studios, but will this first foray into the next generation be a hole in one or simply find itself lost in the rough.
The Golf Club is fantastically simple, it doesn’t boast a career mode with 100s of tournaments, nor does it have every kind and brand of golf club and apparel you can think of. What The Golf Club offers the player is the ability to simply pick up and play the beautiful game at your own pace offering a great challenge with everything stripped back; it’s just you and your club.
In previous golfing game franchises we have seen career and player progression, this is not evident in The Golf Club. There is no changing clubs to increase power and accuracy and there isn’t any way to boost your player to make him play like Rory Mcilroy. This leaves you with a crossroad some of you thrive on a challenge and this is certainly one, the game shows no mercy on some courses and will reward and frustrate more than any golf game I have played before.
A wide range of official golf courses are on offer from HB Studios but there are no real golf courses such as St Andrews or Royal Birkdale for instance. This means that it is down to the community to continue creating the courses using the Greg Norman Course Designer, more on that later. The courses themselves, more specifically the hazards and greens play different and there is a clear distinction between these.
Graphics in the game are not blockbuster but there not bad either; middle of the road is the best way to describe it. Sometimes the water looks fantastic and the back drops to the courses are equally realistic but some of the courses offer some graphical inconsistencies which is a shame. The sound of your club hitting the ball is perfection and something which HB Studios have done exceptionally alongside the different noises for clubs, hazards and that ever so sweet putt. The sole commentator on the game is slightly dull. He tries to add a little humour to your misfortune at times claiming that your shot he thought was bound for the fairway is now sat bottom of a lake aside from this is pretty plain and often repetitive.
As previously mentioned there is no career mode so how do you pick up and play, well there are a variety of online Tournaments and tours created by the players of the game as well as HB Studios. These tournaments, Tours and Courses can be for friends only and open to the public so a nice variety of options for game content to be created.
Moving onto what was really the show piece of the Golf Club, Greg Norman’s Course Designer. Offering a firstly simplistic take on the idea; offering players to increase the number of hazards such as sand, water and trees with a simple graphic changing it from few to substantial for example. Once complete you can alter the scale of the land and the roll as well as the lie of the greens offering a chance to increase or decrease the difficulty of the course which has been generated. What we can see in the earlier few days of the game that content so far has been relatively widely available and that no course has been alike in the multiple rounds which I have played.
Overall The Golf Club is a nice addition to the Xbox One although its longevity without Career and official licencing can be called into question. At £27.99 this game can act as a stop gap to what will probably be the next golfing arrival in PGA Tour 15 next year, and fans of this type of game will thoroughly enjoy all that HB Studios has to offer for all you wannabe Nick Faldos.
