Developer: Giant Margarita

Publisher: Giant Margarita

Release Date: 19th October 2017

Price: £13.49/$15.00

Thanks to Ian at Giant Margarita for the code!

It’s pretty crazy to think that in the space of the eight months the Nintendo Switch has been out, we’ve received three distinctly golf games, from Infinite Minigolf to Golf Story and now we have Party Golf. Party Golf is the least alike to a golf game, taking on a 2D plane view, akin to the Worms series or Angry Birds, and also heavily multiplayer focused.

Party Golf is similar to those games due to the way your ball has an arc that you can move up and down but the big difference here is that instead of taking turns, it’s every person for themselves, trying to reach the goal quickest. It’s a hectic battle, full of ricochets and colours that turns more chaotic with each player you add to the game. It’s here that Party Golf sticks true to its name by allowing up to 8 players at one time and one of the few games on the Nintendo Switch to do so.

I personally didn’t get the opportunity to try this out with 7 other friends as I didn’t have enough controllers but the game allows you to use AI for the missing players you don’t have. Party Golf itself has a simple gameplay loop where the only control you have is to change the trajectory of your character whenever you’re lying still on a flat surface. It’s easy to think that this can get stale, however Giant Margarita took this concept and taken it to unimaginable levels.

Party Golf has over 300 customizable settings, from different shapes for your ball to forcefields that blast off nearby enemies. The amount of modes and settings at your beckoning is staggering and hard to even go into detail about so it’s definitely worth it to go play around with the settings. Also on top of all that, each level is procedurally generated, meaning that no round will ever be the same.

Party Golf doesn’t have the best look to it, with a very simple artstyle, more reminiscent of mobile games. The backgrounds and level design are pretty plain and definitely leave more to be desired but I guess it works with the amount of colours at play. The menus and UI could also be better, with them not being optimised well for tabletop mode and just looking lazy and boring.

Also, I do wish there was more of a single player here, apart from just playing against AI in the settings you wish. The AI is great and fun to play against but I wish there was a mode available where you had targets to acheive or levels that were actually designed by the team.

All in all, Party Golf is a great multiplayer game and one of the best on the Switch to date. There is hours of playtime here, with every round being as different as it could be from the next. The overall gameplay loop does tend to get stale for a while so you can’t play for hours on end but is a great time for the times you have friends over, especially when you get closer to 8 people. The lack of a single player mode and basic UI and graphics to the game do bring it down a notch but if you’re looking solely for a multiplayer game, you won’t do much better on the Switch right now.

My score for Party Golf on the Nintendo Switch:

Like It

All reviews on this website are rated on the scale of Hate, Dislike, Meh, Like, Love.

I personally don’t believe in the number scale so hopefully my review and conclusion help you decide if the game is for you or not.