Hands On With The Golf Club 2
I think it’s safe to say that golf games are designed for golf enthusiasts. The Tiger Woods series definitely opened up the genre to a wider audience, but without a big star’s name on the cover, most people probably wouldn’t give a golf game the attention it deserves. While these games may not be at the top of everyone’s priority list, Golf Club 2 has a good chance to be the golf game that returns everyone to the genre.
Usually when a golf game comes out, you can expect it to have licensed courses, but being a small developer HB Studios has decided to go a different route by creating an incredible course editor. In the first Golf Club, users created over 108,000 courses. This allows HB Studios to rely on an obviously healthy community and invest money in improving gameplay, as well as updating their course editor. One major improvement to the course editor is that users will be able to import their maps from the original Golf Club and add new features like waterfalls to their course.
The gameplay is fairly straight forward, but by no means easy. You use the right analog to pull back on the club and then push forward to drive the ball. The key to success is timing your swing and making sure the ball goes straight. After playing the game for about 30 minutes, I felt comfortable getting to the green, but putting is a whole different beast.
Putting uses the same mechanics, but trying to figure out how far you should pull back and how fast you should push forward can really become a challenge. The best I could do out of all the courses I played, was getting a birdie on a par 5, which means 4 shots total.
Having an easily accessible golf game with one of the best course creators I’ve ever seen in any game makes my Golf Club 2 experience a hole in one! Yes, I did go there.