Everybody’s Golf: Hot Shots Review

Over Par

HIGH It’s a new Everybody’s Golf on multiple platforms! Yay!

LOW It’s a low-effort Everybody’s Golf on multiple platforms. Gah.

WTF Why does the thirteen-year-old Vita version look better than this?

Ah, Golf. The age-old sport of smashing a tiny ball with a club so that it flies hundreds of yards towards a hole the size of someone’s fist, avoiding sand traps and rough patches of grass along the way. Brilliant! And given its simplicity, an absolutely perfect fit for videogames. Green grass, blue skies, nerve-wracking shots across an undulating green… a good golf title is a thing of beauty, and few come close to the Everybody’s Golf experience.

For those not familiar with the franchise, it’s basically far and away the best golf series in the world. Sure, this may be my subjective opinion rather than an established, concrete fact, but it takes such a cheerful and personality-driven approach to characters and presentation that it’s easy for even the most golf-agnostic player to get lured in and sideswiped by the depth of its gameplay systems and breadth of things to unlock.

Up until now the series has been exclusive to Playstation consoles, with all but one previous entry developed by the talented Clap Hanz studio. Now Bandai Namco and HYDE have taken the reins, released it on every modern platform (aside from Xbox for whatever reason) and… well, results are mixed, unfortunately.

First, the good.

For the most part it plays well, with the traditional ‘three-tap’ approach to smacking the ball up the fairway. Select a club, tap a button to start the swing gauge, tap it again to set power and then one last time to set the impact angle. Spin, fade and other technical tomfoolery can be applied during this process to help direct it into the hole, as well as various special moves once unlocked – a Rising Shot will blast up the flagpole before dropping into the hole, for example, or a Super Spin will spiral around it in an unrealistic but visually pleasing flourish.

While only two characters are available at the start, it isn’t long before a bunch of anime golfers are available via their story modes, and they all have quirks which can affect gameplay. Some may favor playing at night or in the early morning, leading to easier or harder shot timing depending on the time of day. Some may enjoy playing in the rain or hate taking tee shots on longer courses, others may have their shots naturally soar higher than others to avoid obstacles, or be better at other technical aspects of each shot.

As a result, there’s almost certainly going to be a character that gels well for every player. I personally opted for Erika as my main — not because she’s a golfing virtuoso on the field, but because she has a high chance of accidentally bashing herself in the face with her club while celebrating a birdie, the adorable little klutz.

As mentioned, there’s plenty to unlock — a wide range of characters, golf clubs and balls with specific strengths and weaknesses, as well as performance-enhancing food, caddies, costumes and all sorts of good stuff for players who put the time in. While a few more characters being available right off the bat would have been welcome, it’s an experience that rewards those who put the time in.

There are also plenty of modes available, from standard tournaments and party modes with random course effects, to a story mode for every character. It’s nothing too fancy, typically just the selected cast member having a chinwag with their friends and adversaries before playing a round of golf under various rulesets, but it’s a welcome addition.

In addition to the above, each course has a day and night cycle, variable weather systems, specific rules such as additional penalties for bunker shots, or miniature vortexes tucked away in each hole helping to suck close but marginally wayward shots towards their goal. Variety isn’t a problem here.

So! It’s great, right? Well… at heart it’s an enjoyable game of golf, but it’s not without some serious issues.

The first thing players will likely notice is that the default camera angle was apparently chosen by someone who’s never played golf — or even videogames before — offering a skewed angle that hinders the player’s ability to see what’s directly in front of them. Fortunately this can be permanently changed to a more traditional view in the options, but it gives a bizarre first impression.

Everybody’s Golf: Hot Shots also looks objectively worse than the Vita version of Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational which was released more than a decade ago. This isn’t an exaggeration for comedic effect — the Vita build is visibly superior in almost all areas, ranging from overall presentation and personality to color depth and texture work.

About the only objective graphical improvement seen in Everybody’s Golf: Hot Shots is that it can run at sixty frames a second, which should be a given… but given the occasionally shaky performance, it somehow misses the mark there as well, which makes things interesting while trying to take a shot as the swing timer can be affected. It also crashed any time I tabbed out of the game or attempted to change the window from full screen to borderless, so the PC version still needs work.

The gameplay also occasionally lands in the rough, with too many shots screwing up in an unrealistic manner. During the final hole of the Top Pro tour I took two nearly identical shots in quick succession with wildly different outcomes — one swing landing out of bounds and causing a reset, the next neatly flopping down close to the hole. There was no wind, nothing that could have caused such a huge disparity in outcome. Failing any other explanation, the game must have grossly miscalculated the first swing.

Someone once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but they were wrong — the definition of insanity is performing the exact same stroke under the same conditions only to have the bloody golf ball curve sharp left on the first attempt, then veer hard right on the second. It certainly drove me insane, anyway.

Thankfully this randomness in the physics was only an occasional hiccup — if it happened more frequently, I’d say the game was fundamentally broken. Thankfully it isn’t, but when these moments of inexplicable weirdness crop up, they’re hard to ignore. Hopefully this issue will be patched soon.

It’s great to finally have Everybody’s Golf on PC, and even though this entry fails to meet the series’ usual high standards, it still offers a fine walk out on the links. That said, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that it’s only achieved the absolute minimum here. Until the various bugs and other issues are patched out, I simply can’t recommend Everybody’s Golf in its current state. No matter how good the general golfing experience is, it’s impossible to ignore the wonky physics and overall lack of ambition. What should have been a near-effortless hole in one is perilously close to becoming a triple bogey instead.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by HYDE and published by Bandai Namco. It is currently available on PS5/Switch and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 22 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and plenty of tournaments were won and courses unlocked. 3 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10+ and contains Mild Language and Mild Suggestive Themes. The official description reads: This is a golf simulation game in which players select from a collection of golfers to compete in matches. During a World Tour mode, characters engage in brief dialogue that references suggestive material (e.g., “…I heard I could use it to gaze up some lovely ladies”; “…[Y]our stalkers are on a whole new level of crazy”; “Did I startle you? Or were you peeking at something naughty?”). Some loading sequences depict close-up camera pans of golfers’ bodies. The word “damn” appears in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. I’d rate this game as 100% playable without sound — while the caddies may call out things to be aware of, this important information such as wind speed or green undulation can always be acquired visually.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

Spawned in the wilds of Scotland like some random MMORPG enemy whose sole purpose is to be hunted down and slaughtered for loot, young Darren spent the first fifty years of life eating bark and bears alike in a desperate bid to survive the elements.

The chance discovery of a muddy, burnt out copy of ’50 Shades of Grey’ in a hunting pit gave him an appreciation for complex plots, characters and overarching narrative, and the unexpected gift of a Spectrum 48k allowed him to indulge in these newfound sensibilities with intelligent, highbrow games such as ‘flee from the badly animated spinning turquoise dolphins’ or ‘avoid the deadly glowing bricks of doom’.

The fusion of both these interests finally culminated with Darren teaching himself how to write by basically guessing at what words might look like when jotted down on paper as opposed to being howled inarticulately at the skies.

Now others occasionally get to read his scribblings. Lucky them.