It’s amazing what you can do with a flaming golf ball. Over the course of the last week or so, I’ve destroyed suits of armour, incinerated priceless works of literature, ruined cakes, smashed vases, set off crossbows, ignited petrol pumps, and generally made everywhere from convenience stores to mansions look like the aftermath of a particularly wild party from those restrained intellectuals generally known as the cast of Geordie Shore.
This has all, of course, been within the confines of Dangerous Golf, the new game from Three Fields Entertainment, a tiny studio primarily made up of ex-Criterion devs. The obvious inspiration for all this destruction is, therefore, Burnout’s Crash Mode, the moment where the unashamedly arcade racer cut loose and simply asked players to cause as much damage as possible. To some extent, that iconic Crash Mode casts a shadow over Dangerous Golf, with even the most outré scenes of domestic devastation never quite matching the ludicrous thrill of causing a lane-blocking multi-car pileup.
However, while it definitely whets the appetite for a current-gen Crash Mode, Dangerous Golf is also great fun in its own right, continually finding ways to reinvent its basic formula of how much stuff can you smash up. It’s also quite unlike any golf game in history, there are no clubs and no swingometer, with your tee shot simply taken by pushing the left analog stick forward. Hit enough objects (the number varies depending on the hole) and you’ll be able to trigger your smashbreaker, a press of circle igniting your ball and giving you full control as it bounces around on its trail of mayhem. Squeeze R1 to enter danger time, and the action shifts into slow motion, not only making the exploding champagne bottles, flying cutlery, and tumbling tins of paint even more spectacular, but also allowing you to make minute adjustments as you seek out whatever destructible objects you’ve been tasked with obliterating. After your smashbreaker has run out, you’ll enter putting mode, the game’s one concession to real golf.
Wherever you end up, you’ll need to sink the putt into an oversized hole, failure means your score gets halved meaning that, at best, your nailed-on gold medal becomes a bronze and, at worst, you lose your medal score altogether. The safe option is simply to knock the ball straight into the hole, but the game is far keener on pool-esque trick shots and will generously compensate for shots that bounce off walls and objects before landing in the hole, as well as handing you a significant score bonus if you successfully pull it off.
Just as in Burnout’s Crash Mode, dollars are the scoring currency of Dangerous Golf, with each object taken out assigned a dollar value that pops up on screen, with a large painting, for example, worth about $15,000. Integral to most holes (levels) is the smashdown, a $50,000 bonus awarded for destroying all highlighted objects on a stage such as taking out eight suits of armour or hundreds of aerosol cans. Each level also has a Secret Sauce bonus, with hitting a secret gold bottle earning a handy $25,000 payout.
Apart from that, you’ll find different requirements as you travel to France (an ornate mansion complete with wine cellar, dining room, and hall of mirrors), the US (a kitchen full of things waiting to go smash and a bathroom whose cubicle walls and urinals prove no match for your powered-up projectile), Australia (a gas station with obvious explosive potential and a convenience store full of products neatly stacked on fragile-looking shelves), and England (a medieval castle that comes kitted out with the aforementioned suits of armour and crossbows, as well as stained glass windows and priceless furniture) in the game’s sprawling Career Mode. In total, this consists of 100 holes split across 10 tours of increasing difficulty, with new abilities (such as laser-sighted aiming or the ability to earn an extra smashbreaker by dropping into a bucket) earned for each tour completion. Depending on your tolerance for puns, you’ll either find the hole naming convention amusing or infuriating, with clever plays on words (Candle Whacks) accompanied by more prosaic examples of the genre (Inconvenience Store).
The game does everything it can to keep things feeling fresh, with time limits, warp zones, and game over hazards all included. There are holes where you’ll have the ability to stick balls on walls with glue, deploy and trigger bombs, trigger instant smashbreakers found throughout the level, where the flag for the final hole won’t appear until you’ve caused enough destruction or where high scores are rewarded with bronze, silver, gold, and platinum money flags, each of which can be putted into for an ascending bonus. Of these, the time limit holes are particularly clever, as deploying the slow-motion danger time only slows your ball down, not the time limit, forcing you to ration the use of what has, at that point, become a dependable crutch. Finally, each tour concludes with a timed putting challenge, with bronze, silver, and platinum money flags planted around an arena and bonus points awarded for deflected trick shots. The tricky part is you only have three balls, and you lose one for each miss.
Therefore, while the game does eventually become a little repetitive (there’s only so many ways you can spin smash stuff up with a golf ball), overall Career Mode is strong, providing a lengthy, evolving challenge that forces you to use your abilities. Dollar damage is rewarded in the same fashion as the game’s money flags, with bronze, silver, gold, and platinum medals awarded for greater levels of skilled destruction. Generally, getting a bronze is relatively straightforward, but attaining that hold requires careful thought and concentration, with a platinum requiring every detail of the hole to be explored and exploited. In a nice bit of visual shorthand, you’ll generally know what medal you’ve got as soon as you’ve sunk the final putt, the hole simply explodes in a shower of sparks for bronze and silver medals, while a gold-medal winning performance incinerates the flag, and getting a platinum blows the flagpole out of the hole altogether.
Impressively for a budget title, the whole Career Mode can also be played in pass-the-pad co-op mode, while Party Golf allows up to four players to go head to head. Most remarkably, online play is also included, with everything unlocked from the start and danger time disabled for a truer test of your Dangerous Golf-ing prowess.
Overall then, there’s a lot to like about Dangerous Golf, with all this carnage generally looking pretty good thanks to the power of Unreal Engine 4 and a nice seam of British humour running throughout. There are, however, a couple of issues that can get in the way of the destructive fun. Chief among these is the fact that, despite danger time giving the player camera control, it’s still quite easy to get your view stuck behind your flaming golf ball, making it hard to see what’s actually going on. There were also a few crashes during my time with the game, although this is perhaps to be expected given the size of the developers. However, an earlier issue with long loading times has already been fixed, so it’s clear Three Fields are committed to their player base and keen to respond to their feedback. Finally, perhaps it’s just me, but I longed for slow motion replays set to classical music so I could really enjoy my most dramatic scenes of destruction; they would have been a fitting reward for that meticulously constructed platinum medal-winning run.
Developer: Three Fields Entertainment
Publisher: Three Fields Entertainment
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC
Release Date: 3rd June 2016