Everybody’s Golf: World Tour

Three-tap control systems were said to be a thing of the past when Tiger Woods burst on the scene a few years ago. With its new-fangled analogue control scheme people instantly proclaimed that this was the future of golf games. Here we are then, numerous years and a whole generation of consoles later, with a golf game that is better than any that have come before it, and it features a three-tap control system.

At first glance and even first play, Everybody’s Golf World Tour is nothing special. Visually it’s only slightly better than a PS2 game, it’s far too childlike, overly cutesy and the gameplay appears to be very basic. Aim your shot, press the button to start the power bar, press it a second time to set the power bar and press it a third time to set the accuracy. So last-gen! Having only one course available at the start only seems to reassure the player further that this is nothing to get overly excited about. But on your second game you start to get it. By your third game you’re starting to apply spin and slice to the ball, avoiding trees and back-spinning the ball towards the pin with some semblance of accuracy. By your fourth game Everybody’s Golf has won a place in your heart. The visuals suddenly take on more charm, the sickly-sweet presentation is now endearing and it’s suddenly the most accurate golf game you’ve ever played, with undulations on the fairways and greens and weather being just as important to consider as the timing of your shot. Put simply Everybody’s Golf is suddenly not only the best golfing game ever, but also one of the best games available on the PS3.

For a game that starts off so unappealing and almost annoying it really is a strange turn of events. It’s not as though Everybody’s Golf doesn’t even have its faults. For instance only having one course to play on for the first two-three hours of the game should be a major stumbling point. Furthermore only one course is available online from the start, restricting your options of what games you can join and what tournaments you can enter, and the choice of two golfers, both reasonably similar in terms of stats. In order to unlock more courses and characters you have to play through multiple rounds of the Challenge mode (72 holes to be exact), playing the same course over and over again, until you unlock another one. It’s as though the game is deliberately trying to restrict your enjoyment by offering as little variety as possible. It’s funny then that none of that matters one bit.

Due to the variety in weather between holes, let alone rounds, no round of Everybody’s Golf plays the same. The control system also adds to this greatly, as timing button presses is much harder to get right 100% of the time than pushing an analogue stick backwards and forwards. Whereas in Tiger Woods you can pretty much always put the ball on the same blade of grass (with all of the AI characters usually within spitting distance of your ball), Everybody’s Golf is much more unpredictable. You can go from putting a beautiful drive off of the tee right into the middle of the fairway to sending the ball flying into the trees the very next shot. AI opponents also make errors, with drives going into the woods and chips rolling off of the green and into a bunker. It’s testament to the AI that they feel human; unless you were told it would be very hard to know whether you were playing a human opponent online or one of the AI opponents.

There is a new ‘Advanced’ control system available to choose from, but other than being aesthetically different, it’s really the exact same three-tap control system of old. Rather than having a power meter to time your shots you instead watch your golfer play their backswing, time your button press to the appropriate point within the backswing to set the desired power and then watch the clubface swing downwards towards the ball and once again time your button press to set the accuracy. This system does take some getting used to (especially judging power) but it’s there for those that want to persevere and get the reward of using a slightly more realistic-looking control scheme. Putting is slightly easier in this mode though due to a ghost of the ball travelling towards the hole as the putter makes its journey backwards, giving you much better control over the power of your shot.

Online Everybody’s Golf World Tour is even more exquisite than it is offline. The online lobby is just as cutesy as everything else in Everybody’s Golf, with the option to create your own Mii-like character to represent you (with more variations becoming available the more you play). Each of the rooms has a theme, ranging from Jungle to Beach environments and offer up a chance to mess about for a few minutes, chatting to people (via text entry) and playing about with some of the furniture (for instance indulging in a bit of sunbathing on a recliner). As well as joining or creating games for up to seven others to join, you can also enter tournaments that start on a quarter-hourly basis. These tournaments accept up to 50 people and sometimes give out in-game prizes to the winner. A time-limit is present and prevents people from taking too long pondering shots and ruining the experience for everyone else.

There are a plethora of rooms and floors to go in, so there are always plenty of people to find and hardly any chance of the server being full. There isn’t any voice-chat, which depending on your view is either a good or bad thing, but you can enter in messages or select one from a list to taunt other players or congratulate them on a well-placed shot. It’s all very sociable online; almost everyone I have encountered has been pleasant and very friendly, congratulating you on good shots and entering into little friendly digs when they’ve just got a birdie. It’s very similar to the online social aspect of Animal Crossing and adds yet another huge tick in the ‘things Everybody’s Golf gets right’ box.

It seems that the developers of Everybody’s Golf have thought of everything as even when you’re languishing at the bottom of the tournament table or massively behind an AI opponent, there’s still something to play for. Due to the points system that rewards you for birdies and well-placed shots as well as deductions made for landing in bunkers or slicing into the rough, every hole is a goal. No matter how far you end up behind somebody you’re still able to accumulate points that go some way to elevating you up the ranks and improving your character loyalty (which in turn improves other aspects of your game). Points also come into it if the scores are tied at the end of the game.

The only slight mar might be that veterans of the Everybody’s Golf series, and especially those that owned the PS2 version, might feel a little short-changed, at least initially. With only six courses available and the other unlockables (such as additional clubs and outfits) being a little underwhelming, as well as visually being very similar to the PS2 version, there’s a feeling that it hasn’t progressed as much as it should. It soon becomes apparent however that these things just don’t matter. Yes six courses may sound too few, but due to the variation of weather effects and how intricately detailed they are (compared to Tiger Woods’ more life-like and therefore bland offerings), no two rounds play the same. There’s also the promise of at least another two to download through the PSN Store (rumoured to be priced at £4 per course) and with the game being £10 cheaper than most RRP’s of PS3 games, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal at all. Throw in excellent online multiplayer modes and tournaments and suddenly the lack of progress really isn’t an issue.

What might be an issue for some though is the necessity to install Everybody’s Golf to the PS3’s hard drive. Taking up close to 5gb and still sporting relatively long load times isn’t acceptable. When more feature-packed games such as Condemned 2 can manage to be played without installation and with relatively minor loading times, it smacks of lazy programming by the developers of Everybody’s Golf. If Sony don’t soon tighten up on the space used for installations (or even make installations optional) then we can soon see PS3 owners having to upgrade their hard drives if they want more than a half a dozen games in their collection.

Hard drive installation aside, I’d be scraping the barrel to think of any other issues that would be worth mentioning. Everybody’s Golf World Tour isn’t massively different to previous versions, but it is significantly different in the right areas and online play has added so much longevity to an already excellent package. If you own a PS3 and don’t buy Everybody’s Golf you really are doing a disservice to yourself. It doesn’t even matter if you think golf is a good walk spoiled, as it even manages to appeal to those that don’t like the sport in real life. Everybody’s Golf World Tour is the Ronseal of videogames – it does exactly what it says on the cover. It’s Everybody’s Golf, and everybody should buy it.

Our rating

9/10