Something happened a few years ago and suddenly every studio with a pulse was eager to make mini golf the newest gaming trend since the phenomenon of Fortnite from Epic Games. They ranged drastically from struggling to be playable with clear content copied from the Unreal Engine store to full-blown titles that explore mini golf in an arcade setting.
Golf With Your Friends is thankfully belonging to the latter half (meaning I chose correctly years ago) and picked up Team17 as a publishing partner along their journey.
Finally, after four years of active development, Golf With Your Friends has an official release date where the version will be considered as ‘done’ by the developers at Blacklight Interactive. The big launch is happening on May 19, 2020. It’s also coming to the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4.
If you’ve never explored precisely what Golf WIth Your Friends is, you’re in for a treat on May 19, even more so if you have the titular entity of ‘friends’. Golf With Your Friends (colloquially GWYF) is a relatively goofy look at mini-golf if real physics, and the need to stand next to your ball in order to putt it, weren’t active constraints in real mini-golf.
From bizarre courses that have saw blades always running, and logs threatening to knock your ball out of play if you aren’t fast enough, to active volcanoes where a scorching fire is a persistent threat, the wide variety of settings that GWYF offers is enough to be an enjoyable glance that could last you for a couple of hours.
Once you include the wild variety of modifiers that you can add into the game, ranging from turning the golf holes into hockey goals (complete with a wooden cutout of a goalie) or basketball hoops that you’ll need to jump into, you can dynamically alter the approach of every course that you encounter. Then you get your friends into the lobby, allow ball collision, and everything becomes immediately clear.
First, that your friends are absolutely horrible people. Second, that you can only clear a course if the council of players in the lobby with you have reasoned that you should be allowed to pass. Knocking balls out of the course as they’re attempting to nail a difficult shot consistently brings laughs and glee at the expense of the one unlucky member of your lobby, and knocking them into hazards that they have to use strokes to get out of is an even better experience.
Golf With Your Friends is coming everywhere on May 19, the only question is whether or not we’ll all be quarantining at that moment. Thankfully, there’s always online play.
