Impressively interesting title which takes you golfing in a dystopian wasteland called Earth. While golfing your way through abandoned cities and listening to a Martian radio station, you will discover what had really happened to our once great society. Golf Club Wasteland is using nonlinear storytelling to a great extent and it is a truly amazing experience.
Golf Club: Wasteland is a good game but not because of the quality of its actual golfing experience. Putting balls into holes is serviceable. There are some well-designed levels but there are also some frustrating ones. Don’t feel any guilt if you play on Story mode and get as much of the narrative as you can, without bothering with hazards or limits. But the developers at Demagog understand how to create atmosphere and how to let the world tell a story. Radio Nostalgia is an impressive achievement, especially the songs. The team does need to find a game theme and a set of mechanics that allows them to flex their world-building muscles in more expansive ways than Golf Club: Wasteland can.
I think it’s a really original game - you are an astronaut who decides to return to an obliterated Earth and play golf in what’s left of it. While you’re on Earth you listen to a radio station based in Mars and people call in to talk about their memories on Earth and play their favorite songs. The developers really did a spectacular job at creating the atmosphere, it really does feel dystopian and nostalgic. The levels are not repetitive at all and you feel challenged to finish the levels in a certain number of shots so you can unlock diary entries.I like that for some levels there are multiple ways that you can win the level. It falls short for me in the way the astronauts story is communicated throughout the game and that the diary entries aren’t super rewarding to unlock because they’re quite random. It’s really worth a play for the vibes though.
My Video Review can be found here:
****/Vy6KTkhk1ZU
Is Golf Club Wastelands the game experience that one shouldn’t miss or is it just a waste of time? Here are the game pros - three storylines with at least two worth to follow, inventive level design, variable environments, perfect dystopian atmosphere, beautiful graphics, great music, narration and fully dubbed people’s stories broadcasted by The Radio Nostalgia From Mars. And here are the game downsides - not very interesting story of the main hero that needs to be unlocked, unpredictable power of strokes that changes by some non-linear curve, absence of skills or other RPG elements that could be developed, no information about the pars and no score or online leaderboard where one could compare his result with others.
Pros:
- three storylines
- level design
- variety of environment
- dystopian atmosphere
- graphics
- music
- The Radio Nostalgia from Mars
Cons:
- storyline of the main hero is not so interesting
- unpredictable power of strokes
- no skills or other RPG elements
- absence of online leaderboard
- no explicit information about pars
- absence of local multiplayer
This game could be much better with the predictable controls, some RPG elements, some score system with online leaderboard and also the presence of some form of a local multiplayer as a separate game mode. I have still enjoyed this game but ironically more because of the game atmosphere and radio broadcast than the golf itself. I am therefore giving this game Thumbs Up and VideoGaming Father’s Index 6+ out of 10 - still recommended but with some bigger discount.
Golf Club: Wasteland can be seen as a kind of skillful outlet, a highly relaxing experience carried by a peculiar post-apocalyptic vibe and effective minimalist gameplay. In particular, we get an impeccable soundtrack, intelligently alternating between musics and precious testimonials for the scenario context. And if the adventure is short, it is given good replayability.
In the end, however, Golf Club Wasteland didn’t need to sell me on its main character for it to work. It tells more than a story about one person or one moment. Instead, its strength is in the world it creates, the microstories of each level, and the layers of social critique in each part of its radio broadcasts. The rich will watch the world burn and complain about the glare―best make sure that golf course is shady.
It could have been a relaxing game about playing golf on the ruins of our civilization, but its whole sporting aspect is subpar (due to poor physics, among others), sometimes frustrating, and makes it harder to appreciate the story. However, Golf Club: Wasteland definitely has its unique flavor and the in-game radio station is fantastic. [12/2021, p.67]
Golf Club: Wasteland is a rather standard golf game bolstered by an experimental narrative approach. This iteration is, have no doubt, an improvement on the niche ideas therein, and for that, I applaud the developers. However, good as these ideas are, they suffer from feeling incompatible with each other. Everything is OK, with the distinct sting of feeling like they could have been great, given the right conditions.
Now here's a game that makes a great case for how to ruin your narrative by including it in a videogame:
By combining it with a pretty terrible golf simulation. While I really like the worldbuilding and the story that is unfolding, and I love the radio station that is playing in the background, it's like reading a nice book... that came with an arbitrary chore that you have to perform before you are allowed to turn the page. Even if that chore was fun and not riddled with terrible controls and cheap physics, why would you put that in your book? There is of course the slightly heavy handed metaphore about how evil and mindless rich people are, but I get it! I got it in the first level. I actually got it in the first 10 seconds of the trailer.
And yes, it's a very nice metaphore, I wholeheartedly support the politics behind it, but the way it's used here all that's missing is Ben Garrison labeling everything. And while the cartoon apocalypse looks nice, it's not adding anything to the storytelling, since the golf course is taking up the visuals.
So, what next? Shakespeare as a platformer? They could still turn this into a great comic, so how about that?
A great premise and fantastic presentation, utterly ruined by the worst implementation of controls I've ever seen in a golf game.
It might as well be a dice roll, if you're using a control pad, as the pitch and power controls (yes, the same basic control scheme you've used in games like Worms and Angry Birds to great effect, for decades) here are deemed to be too easy, so the developer has taken this tried and true system and added random glitching to the controller action to make playing a purposefully vague and frustrating experience, rather than a challenging and rewarding one.
It's as if, playing Angry Birds, someone was grabbing your arm and shaking it fifty times a second, because they think it all adds to the fun of the experience.
They are wrong and so is Untold Tales.
It's a baffling decision to purposefully sabotage a games controls, simply to add difficulty to a game, rather than having better level design, but unfortunately it's also the kind of decision that tells you, no matter how good the overall presentation is, the studio has a bad game designer at the helm, who doesn't really understand the user experience, and who doesn't hold enjoyment as a core principle **** appeal.
'If you want an enjoyable game, don't bother with Golf Club: Wasteland, that's not what it's here for.'
Unfortunately that's a message the developer is transmitting loud and clear, and it's one people looking for fun should heed.
SummaryHuman life is wiped out. Earth is now a golf course for the ultra-rich. The rich fled to Mars but venture back to a desolate Earth for a round of golf. Each hole in the wasteland offers its own little story and possible puzzle to sink the perfect shot. Play through destroyed brutalist monuments, crumbling shopping malls, and abandoned mu...