Golf Story has a very welcome multiplayer mode that heartily scratches the competitive itch I was craving more of during the campaign. The actual matches and tournaments against AI opponents are a lot more fun, giving me someone to pit my practiced skills against, but weirdly there are only about a dozen of them in the entire campaign.
Frankly, you do a lot more of those little accuracy challenges than actual golfing, and it gets a bit repetitive. People might ask you to collect certain items hidden in the level or go on odd foot races around the map, but more often than not they want you to hit a ball to a specific a certain number of times. Experience is used to level up and boost stats like drive distance and accuracy, but these improvements felt much more invisible and didn’t affect my character in interesting ways like the clubs. Money is used to buy new golf clubs with unique effects that don’t always mean the newest club is the best, like an awesome putter that let me curve my hits. There’s a linear questline to follow, with optional objectives and little challenges to complete along the way that earn you money and experience. When you aren't golfing, you’re completing tasks for people that often have very golf-like solutions. I would have really liked an overlay on the green itself to give me a better indication of how the ball will behave. I managed to learn to read that slope indicator well enough on shorter putts, but it becomes extremely hard at distance, and downright infuriating when a lofted ball lands on a seemingly flat green only to bounce unexpectedly due to the slope. Golf Story opts to give you an arrow indicator similar to the one for wind, pointing in the direction of the slope and telling how steep the grade is: flat, light, medium, or heavy. The pixelated art style is lovely, but effectively communicating subtle hills in isometric 2D is next to impossible. The weakest aspect of its golfing is how Golf Story handles slopes on the putting green. But tweaking where on the ball I hit, what spin to put on, and how much power to use can be extremely rewarding when a drive lands right where I want it. That gets more complex when the wind starts blowing harder, which has a very real impact on the ball. Fairways are often small and hard to land on in Golf Story, dotted with sand bunkers, rough grass, and puddles. It’s just complex enough that it allows for an immense amount of finesse and control.
0 kommentar(er)
