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Everybody's Golf World Tour Review

Chris Leyton

01/04/2008

Clap Hanz series ensures its appearance on every PlayStation format with Everybody's Golf: World Tour...

Whether you're prone to a few swings on the fairway or not, Sony and Clap Hanz' Everybody's Golf series has offered something for fanatics and discontented golf widows alike since its arrival on the PSone back in 1998.

Featuring a deceptive range of cute yet equally quite perverse anime characters, Everybody's Golf has always been a hit at TVG with its fantasy style, RPG-like character development and authentic golf gameplay. Widely attributed for causing the first major spike in PS3 sales upon its release as a bundle in Japan last year, the European leg has finally commenced with the release of Everybody's Golf: World Tour across the region.

With only Tiger Woods for competition, TVG eagerly donned a peaked cap and tucked our trousers into our socks to see whether Everybody's Golf can make the generation leap and bring the game of golf to everyone with a PS3.

A New Way To Play Golf

Offering a reasonable selection of modes, World Tour's most prominent feature is the return of online play from the fourth and last title to appear on the PlayStation2. Besides challenging likeminded fanatics across the globe in match and tournament options, World Tour's long term appeal rests with the Challenge mode. A series of golfing tournaments that present the challenge of gaining experience and rising through the ranks, it's here where Everybody's Golf demonstrates the same brilliance that has become a reassuring trait of the series.

Anybody who's enjoyed Everybody's Golf in the past will know immediately what to expect. Shiny, happy, anime characters take to the golf course and bring an air of charisma and frivolity that's generally lacking in golf games - who wants to be Tiger Woods when you can be Shigeki Maruyama after all?

Underneath the overbearingly cheery style however lies a golfing simulation up there with the very best. Able to hold its own with the more prominent Tiger Woods series, Everybody's Golf continues to usurp the mighty Tiger in the realism stakes primarily due to the lack of gimmicky gameplay elements such as applying spin to the ball during its flight through the air!

Restricting the series' traditional triple-tap button swing mechanic to the Standard control method, World Tour introduces a new gameplay mechanic with accomplished effect. Essentially it operates with the same principle of tapping the X button three times to: instigate the shot, select the amount of power in the backswing, before once again to decide the accuracy as the club strikes the ball. The difference comes from the lack of a gauge to indicate power, instead relying on the swing animation exclusively and the yellow and red flashes from the club that indicate 50% and 100% power respectively. It's a small alteration to be fair, but it nevertheless gets away from focusing entirely on a gauge and is less twitchy than the thumbstick setup. More appropriately, Clap Hanz has wisely shied away from implementing SixAxis motion control, which would have undoubtedly ended up in the usual unresponsive and unwieldy mess.

The Legend of Everybody's Golf

One of the greatest aspects of the Everybody's Golf series lies with the character development. Similar to an RPG, progress through the Challenge mode is achieved by winning tournaments and earning experience, which in turn unlocks a veritable barrage of new characters, caddies, clubs, balls, and new shots. At the end of each tier of tournaments lies a Versus challenge, a Match Play face-off against a range of unlockable characters with a win needed to advance rank and access the next tier of challenges. The sense that you're constantly progressing and unlocking new content, particularly new trick shots and special rules, provides a strong sense of attachment and immersion to Everybody's Golf: World Tour beyond what would be traditionally expected from a golf game.

It's also a game packed full of magical touches. Keeping the wind speed unknown during the drive, a simple tap of the down button will toss a few blades of grass into the air to gain a better idea. The ability to add fade and draw, backspin and topspin (along with super variations) is elegantly implemented with corresponding presses on the d-pad during the backswing and strike motions; it's a game you just can't help feeling very, very happy with.

Unfortunately anybody who's ever played Everybody's Golf before (or any golf game) will find the lack of challenge during the initial ranks and tournaments slightly off-putting (pun well and truly intended). It's only once you've passed through the first couple of ranks and achieved the lofty status of Semi-Pro that any challenge begins to manifest and brings with it significantly more entertaining courses, although, disappointingly, there has been a reduction in courses and characters from the series last outing on the PlayStation2. There is the promise of gigs of downloadable content via the PlayStation Store, but this has yet to materialise.

The processing power of the PlayStation3 hasn't gone to waste with Everybody's Golf, undergoing something of a visual overhaul and looking much the better for it. The anime characters feature far more detail than ever before, although that should really be expected from the generation jump. It's the small little touches however that tickle our fancy, like the caddies sprinting after a drive and gasping for breathe when they arrive where the ball dropped, or waving close up to the camera before taking a tee shot. The depiction of wind is stronger (not literally) then we've seen in any golfing game so far, making it easier to feel the wind by observing the visual gusts, listening and watching the trees and plants sway in the wind, than rely on the traditional arrow indicator.

PlayStation Network support allows up to eight players to compete in matches under a variety of different configurations. 50 Player tournaments and virtual lobbies (collect avatar clothes with special shots) round off a comprehensive online offering, although the lack of voice chat is particularly disappointing when you want to have a good time on the golf course with your friends.